5

Your decision is yours, though your decision impacts others as your Internet-exposed router, if insecure, can be used as a jump point or as part of a botnet that inflicts damage on others.

Here’s one individuals chronicle of OEM router vulnerabilities: Router Bugs Flaws Hacks and Vulnerabilities

For specifics, the KRACK, 802.11 vulnerability is well known at this time and many manufacturers don’t appear to have patched to eliminate it.

Just because you have a home router doesn’t mean that you’re not the target of “advanced, likely state-sponsored or state-affiliated actor’s widespread” attacks on your device.

I think you should also determine if there is actually a meaningful connectivity loss. Most portable devices “sleep” their wireless connections when not actively used to reduce power consumption. Minstrel HT is the default power-control algorithm for 802.11 itself, and is what is used by most drivers that I am aware of. As ping is generally ICMP, which is best-effort and not guaranteed by specification1, it is not surprising to loose a few from time to time (with no meaningful impact on end-to-end connectivity).

1 Internet Control Message Protocol - Wikipedia for a general description, RFC 792: Internet Control Message Protocol et. seq., for the specifications themselves.