Be careful when buying anything TP-Link when it comes to routers, they tend release a handful of firmware updates at the most, then make a new hardware revision and drop support for the older hardware revision(s).
Not saying Asus is perfect here, far from it, as you need to check which models they do regular updates for here as well, since some models/SKUs are not well supported, whereas others have been seeing updates for a decade.
Same with Netgear, some products like the Nighthawk R7800 has seen close to a decade of updates, other products got dropped after a year or two.
From a hardware perspective, are you going to use wireless or wired backhaul? If you're going to use wireless, you want models with three or four radios and those cost a small fortune, regardless of brand. If you only get two radios, then the 5 GHz radio will be doing split duty between backhaul and dealing with your devices, which imho isn't a good idea. If you got wired backhaul, a dual radio device is fine, just make sure wired backhaul is supported.
It's in other words not a matter of a specific brand being better or not, but rather the features on offer by the product itself and whether or not it gets regular software updates, which is really something you want this day in age where new security issues is found on a regular basis.
I used two routers (different brands) and range extender, with the RE and one router set up as wireless access points with wired backhaul and I had no issues roaming between the three units, all using the same SSID. Your milage may vary though and I'm not saying this was the ideal setup, but I also set it up before consumer mesh setups was a "thing" and it worked fine for over half a dozen years.
