That was useful description of the issue. I'm running a Intel AX200 (pop!os) and it seems to be working well.

"Intel wireless cards are among the best for Linux, with support for new devices landing even before they are released. however, they have one big drawback: LAR (Location-Aware Regulatory).

basically the card detects in which country it is (and therefore the regulatory domain) based on nearby access points' ones, and doesn't let you change it manually. the sad thing is that it often sets the card to the wrong country, which is a problem.

prior to Linux 5.5 there was an option to disable this annoying feature in the iwlwifi module (lar_disable=1), but it was removed as later firmware versions caused card crashes and Intel claimed the option shouldn't be accessible anyway "

This is utterly absurd for an AP. It effectively implements a very poor consensus algorithm by which the nearby APs coordinate to decide what country they’re in. Of course, in the absence of any of the APs having any authoritative idea, it won’t work very well.

What insane lengths are people prepared to go to to work around this issue, and still...

> since it does not disable LAR at all, it inherits the issue of requiring a 5GHz access point to be active and near the card in order to detect a 5GHz-able country.