[amaterasu]

Every SoC I've dealt with containing a WiFi core has a dedicated coprocessor (RPU is a common name, depending on vendor) running its' own firmware. So more likely, _that_ core would go funky, then crash. The kernel might have code to recover that, but I doubt it, and it certainly would complain the whole way as you say.

[londons_explore]

In the Pi, the coprocessor is the GPU, and it is the first to initialize on boot and runs all the firmware-like stuff and handles all IO and does memory allocations/mappings.