On a typical home user desktop linux setup, there’s virtually no difference between your regular user and root.
Access to your data, emails, passwords, installing software (in /home), access to LAN and so on are already possible without root permissions, so there really is not a whole lot that an attacker cannot do even without root.
And then, if you use sudo or su (or whatever) to switch to root with a password, escalating to root privileges is basically trivial for an attacker. An attacker can divert your PATH to compromised binaries. They could just replace “sudo” with their own little script that steals your password.
So I assume this is not old info and the thing shows up in lspci?
wifi seems to be a shell script coming from tlp, maybe you can do:
sh -x /usr/bin/wifi
to figure out why it thinks you have no wifi. This gives you a trace of the commands that wifi actually runs.
Also, wifi should be managed by NetworkManager so you could look into that documentation and log files for that. Also look at kernel logs like dmesg maybe.
Also also, this could be hardware problem of course. Maybe it just needs to be fully powered off to reset. Have you tried removing the battery? If you cannot do that, there might be little hole at the bottom of the laptop, to stick a paper clip into, to completely power cycle the machine. Maybe that’ll reset it.