You can customise your console login with /etc/issue too!

My Mikrotik routers and switches also reboot in seconds (even for upgrades), which I’ve never seen consumer gear do!

Even my Ubiquiti switches seem to take a minute or so to start forwarding traffic after a reboot; whilst my Mikrotik switches reboot faster than any of my unmanaged switches start up.

Perhaps there was an easier lighter-weight way of doing this?

Yeah, SSH tunneling. What I would do (and have done in the past) is something like:

ssh -L 8080:192.168.0.1:80 myserver

That will forward port 8080 on your host to port 80 on 192.168.0.1, so you can access your router’s web UI with http://localhost:8080/ in your own web browser.

You can also setup full tunneling with SSH, but that requires messing around with SOCKS and I usually can’t be bothered.