I've been running Ubuntu on laptops for a lot longer than five years and the last time I had real WiFi issues was over a decade ago. That's why I think it may be debian related or based on your description, possibly a closed source driver issue. There's actually quite a lot of WiFi devices that use chipsets that we don't have proper Linux drivers for at all, and what exists are sort of hacked together projects that live on github. I've had to do this with every netgear dongle I ever had, the downloading and compiling drivers for it from github.