I know this is me coming from my spoiled perspective of Linux and macOS, but the advice of running a VM that manages the WiFi hardware and passing it back to the OS seems insane to me

If an OS is designed to do this from the ground up, it can be incredibly efficient. (See: SeL4). Each process on linux is essentially its own isolated virtual machine already. Linux processes just have all sorts of ambient authority - for example, to access the filesystem and network on behalf of the user which started the process. Restricting what a process can do (sandboxing it) shouldn't have any bearing on performance.

Qubes OS is the Linux version of this concept. Hardware and their drivers get VMs for security boundary isolation.

In my experience, AI is really good at creating bloatware, which makes it doubly frustrating that it is eating up all the RAM.

Computers are so complicated right now that they're literally a network of computers. When you consider the closed firmware issue, using a VM is like having a small router you connect with ethernet. And I believe you could run such VM with 64MB of RAM.

Architecturally it makes a kind of sense given the way firmware operates (a lot of your peripherals are mini-computers inside your computer)

seems pretty solid from a security perspective actually

Honestly it's not spoiled to want to use the hardware you paid for