You could probably replace WiFi chip with Intel one and it would have avoided the issue. I did that with a few Lenovo laptops, but you should watch out for their WiFi chips whitelisting, which is a very annoying hidden blocker if you aren't aware of it.

> and there's some wonkiness with suspend

Check their UEFI, I think they started adding an option for Linux there specifically to handle suspend better. Set it to Linux instead of Windows.