*sigh*, first annoying issue with #btrfs + #OpenWrt: The latter builds its own "patch" tool with libattr.so support. And then tries to build + patch #perl / perl.c inplace. Unfortunately, the #perl tarball has most files with read-only/444 permissions. Which makes libattr.so''s call to "fsetxattr(3, "btrfs.compression", "zstd", 4, 0)" fail with -EACCESS.
Funnily, Debian's "patch" tool without libattr.so linking has no issue with inplace patching on a 444 file on btrfs.