As a long time OpenWrt user I'd say this is probably a change for the better, but I never had any real problems with opkg.

I had never heard of opkg. I looked it up:

opkg: Fork of ipkg lightweight package management intended for use on embedded Linux devices;

ipkg: A dpkg-inspired, very lightweight system targeted at storage-constrained Linux systems such as embedded devices and handheld computers. Used on HP's webOS;

Wikipedia has no dedicated pages for either of them. I guess they're quite niche.

So it's a lot like apt, but with a huge name conflict.

It was about time, opkg is the worst package manager ever.

Hopefully it can actually preserve packages across updates which is incredibly annoying to have to handle manually.

EDIT: Just found about this attended sysupgrade package which should help until when/if the new package manager fixes the issue.

Great if true

He says it was unexpected but it's been being talked about on the GitHub for quite some time now. It was really just a matter of when they decided to do it.