While I am certainly sympathetic to the cause, i found a solution that works (an old Stretch image) and my elderly parents are able to use their 11 year old photo printer and 15 year old scanner over the network instead of by booting up an old Vista machine. So I'm not going to break it. It's on a reasonably secure network and i don't care if it ever sees a single package update as long as it keeps working.
I'll read that thread and see if it makes sense to me to give it a try, just to see and report back, on a completely different sd card. The Zero uses a different wifi part than the Lite, doesn't it? I guess I can personally verify that it's not the xr819 next time i am over there.
While i was arguing with the current Buster and Bionic issues, I could sit and watch the nmtui-connect screen and it would lose connection anywhere from a couple seconds to a few minutes. And sometimes it would reject the wpa-psk key which i presume was a similar sort of failure.
it would also randomly connect to any of the 4 google wifi points regardless of the fact that one of them was 5 feet away from it. Which may just be normal bad behavior.
