That's insanely complicated compared to plugging in a USB dongle.

It's only complicated once, though -- at initial setup.

And that setup part can be largely automated: https://github.com/pgj/freebsd-wifibox

(The computer itself doesn't care much about the complexity. It's a computer.)

My approach costs $0 . You don't need to do the heavy lifting, Wifibox does.

If you've ever had to deal with usb hotplugging then no pci pass through is much simpler