> There are dozens of reasons to do that, unrelated from disabling WiFi.

You're moving goal posts now. If the stock firmware/software now allows disabling Wi-Fi, you don't need to hack the hardware.

And if you can't trust the stock firmware, i.e. you have reason to assume that it's actively malicious (e.g. by turning the Wi-Fi back on randomly), how can you trust the hardware? Who's to say that it doesn't, e.g., have an undocumented transponder feature that replies to a specific type of interrogation?