And this wouldn't have happened with Linux?

Nope. Because Realtek commit their drivers directly to the Linux kernel, they may be a bit slower getting the driver to the consumer depending on their internal team that's developing/handling the driver and how long the code review takes on the kernel maintainer side but even then you can generally get the driver early e.g. before it's merged into the kernel via a dkms a.k.a out-of-tree driver (easily found in something like the AUR). Once the Realtek WiFi driver is merged you don't have to worry about it because it'll be in every distro with the following kernel release.

We had a USB prepared with drivers in advance, but that's useless when you can't get to a desktop. I admittedly didn't realize you couldn't even install Windows 11 without an active network.

Linux would at least let me install the base system and configure the drivers after. Funny enough that USB mentioned is my ventoy and we did experiment with Linux Mint before we started on Windows. It found the NIC and network on the live ISO with no effort, I honestly thought it would be smooth sailing after that experiment.

I would have just gone with mint personally but wasn't my system, was just helping a friend.