This can all be neatly dodged by buying hardware that's known to be supported OOB with FOSS drivers, but more often than not, the machines that I need or want to run Linux on aren't hand-picked to run Linux. They're almost always prebuilts that had originally ran Windows or macOS, and there's often some amount of urgency attached — I need that Linux install now, not in a week when that replacement wifi/bluetooth card from eBay shows up.
It's lead to some ridiculous hijinks to get things working. On more than one occasion, I ended up using a rocky tethered connection to my iPhone, retrying several times due to dropouts, to get Broadcom wifi drivers installed because figuring out the exact package I needed to put on a thumb drive to install offline was nigh impossible.