Is `networking.userControlled` working with `wpa_gui` for anyone?

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I’d like to use wpa_gui in favor of networkmanager, at least for the moment, since there’s no good declarative module for networkmanager yet and I’m too lazy to set up a password substitute mechanism for network manager for the moment.

Yet with this configuration (and some network config), wpa_gui fails to talk to wpa_supplicant (Could not get status from wpa_supplicant):

users.users.tlater.extraGroups = ["network"];

networking.wireless = {
  enable = true;
  allowAuxiliaryImperativeNetworks = true;
  userControlled = {
    enable = true;
    group = "network";
  };
};

I’ve scoured the internet a bit, and found that some people resolve this exact issue by replacing:

ctrl_interface=/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=network
update_config=1

with:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=network
update_config=1

man wpa_supplicant.conf doesn’t show any references to ctrl_interface_group either, but does show the DIR/GROUP syntax repeatedly…

Bizarrely, wpa_cli does work, without root access.

Is this a bug in the module, or are we using an undocumented option? Has the option changed upstream? Why does wpa_gui care but wpa_cli does not? How come nobody else has noticed?

I’m very confused, and probably should spend my time working on a networkmanager module that can actually manage networks instead!