The word you are looking for is firewall not NAT.
No the word I'm looking for is the NAT. It was not designed for security but coincidentally it is doing the heavy lifting for home network security because it is dropping packets from connections originating from outside the network, barring of course, forwarded ports and DMZ hosts because the router has no idea where to route them.
Consumer router firewalls are generally trash, certainly aren't layer 7 firewalls protecting from all the SMB, printer, AD, etc etc vulnerabilities and definitely are not doing the heavy lifting.
By and large automated attacks are not thwarted by the firewall but by the one-way NAT.