There is a new wireless daemon for Linux called iwd, developed by Intel to be an alternative to wpa_supplicant. It is meant to be more lightweight, e.g. to run on embedded devices. Also, I think it should be more consistent in its view of the wireless network status, as I learned in the talk at the "All Systems Go" conference.
I just checked out and compiled the code: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/network/wireless/iwd.git/about/
It's released under LGPL.
It comes with iwmon, a monitoring tool for nl80211* messages, which I just tried out and it's really cool.
Now just figure out what all these messages mean... :o
(*nl80211 = netlink for 802.11 /WiFi. Netlink is a protocol to exchange information on a local operationg system between its kernel and user space.
For example, in nl80211, there are "Scan Request" messages where some application asks your driver to scan for available networks. Then the driver reports the results back in a "Scan Results" message. You can see both in iwmon, but also through tools, like with "iw dev wlan0 scan" on the command line.)
There's a really nice article about that #Linux wireless daemon iwd, thanks to @Jules for finding: https://www.linux.com/news/event/ELCE/2017/new-linux-wifi-daemon-streamlines-networking-stack
Basically all these things that they said in the talk.