Alternative OS vs. Modern High-Speed Networking - What’s the secret?

[kolla]

However, I thought Haiku had implemented a compatibility layer to allow easy porting of Linux wireless drivers.

Not Linux drivers... FreeBSD drivers, https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/HardwareInfo

And for what it's worth, I use various "pi" (orange, raspberry) and old apple airport expresses as bridges/proxies to accomplish modern wireless on alternative or legacy systems where ethernet is the only real option.