ok, I was probably biased by all the slow routers I had, but to my defense even the openwrt wiki mentions that SQM might not be useful with routers that have a slow CPU:

SQM is performed on the CPU, as such slower devices may be unable to keep up with your peak internet speed.

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm

I don't know what were your companies consumer base, but where I live basically everyone has the cheapest old consumer routers that are on the very limits of the openwrt hardware requirements.