In my experience, the WiFi module works as intended but the applications are not up to par.

I also have automatic updates on my IMAP email account and the one night that our email server was having problems, I ended up with an empty battery because the client was spending all its time in the CPU trying to get what it couldn't get.

And when it comes to kernel modules, if there really is a bug in the WiFi kernel module that causes this, unloading and loading it should take care of most problems.