Probably the most common reason for the integrated wifi card becoming “non-deterministically non-recognized” is that the OEM fucked up the rf-kill in that ther

Probably the most common reason for the integrated wifi card becoming “non-deterministically non-recognized” is that the OEM fucked up the rf-kill in that there are slight differences between what the EC firmware and ACPI expect and how the hardware is implemented (missing pull-ups, EMI induced into high-impedance logic trace somewhere…). Anecdotally, on any laptop that I have seen with these kinds of issues (basically every new Intel laptop I bought between 2017 and 2020, which includes lot of weird no-name tablet-in-laptop-formfactor crap, but also ThinkPad X270), it progresses such that the WLAN becomes unusable in Windows but you would hardly even notice in Linux, where it just works. [edit: obviously comparing Windows to Windows is nonsense, it works in _Linux_]