I remember about 10 years ago this was a huge issue for me. Back then I would research and know which chip the wifi used before buying and carefully check versi

I remember about 10 years ago this was a huge issue for me. Back then I would research and know which chip the wifi used before buying and carefully check versions. About 5 years ago I stopped when I saw that everything I looked up supported my stuff for at least 2 years. Since then every machine's wifi worked with a default Ubuntu install. It could also be a selection bias. Most of my machines are north of a thousand dollars and if you buy things in the price range of chromebooks then you are probably getting some low end stuff, maybe the drivers for cheap stuff are that much worse. Maybe the cheap stuff isn't up to spec and needs workarounds that are hidden inside the closed source drivers from the vendor which generally aren't used on Linux.