Finally ditched my ISP’s router and installed my own opnsense firewall with my own Access Point. I have crowdsec running on opnsense to block attacks + adguard to block ads and malicious domains. My network is segmented between my homelab that is exposed and my AP.
Finally feels quite safe in my network 😅
A hardware firewall generally indicates a standalone appliance that is dedicated to being a firewall. Not to be confused with a software firewall as you would see with UFW, or Windows Defender. Modern routers do possess some of the same tenets of a hardware firewall, but a dedicated hardware firewall usually gives a broader range of defenses such as IDS/IPS, filtering, etc.
I have a dedicated hardware firewall in the form of pFsense. The ‘black box’ in OP’s picture is the hardware firewall.