Disabling Wifi Hardware as a security feature?

Hey so this is more of question out of curiosity that would lead to my next actions really. My work place has a bunch of oldish MBPs that I have been upgrading to SSDs (newly in the IT role here and also fairly new to IT in general). I have used CCC to clone the drives and then pop the clone in. Got through 3 of them and the latest one, after putting the drive in it and pressing alt to select the ssd to boot, realised this one doesn’t respond to any of the firmware passwords I have been given by the old IT guy. So, I put the old drive back in as its better is was working in some capacity until I can sort this out and upgrade the drive. Interestingly the Wifi hardware is now “not installed” and I’m wondering if this is a type of anti theft measure by apple - smc reset doesn’t do anything to remedy this, and, of course, PRAM reset needs firmware disabled. My next port of call is to either see if the previous IT guy knows what it could be and failing that then see if we still have documentation for this hardware to take it to a apple store for resetting. I remember in my support essentials training learning that the more modern Macs have even more interesting security measures (especially T2 chip ones) but yeah just wondering if this is something that is intentional by the bios chip or something, or, whether its just by chance that this situation occurred. The good old days of removing a ram stick are over! Any info this would be cool!