I had to get on a laptop to [easily] read this thread, what with my giant 'code' block above, which made the page unbearable on a phone, so sorry for the delay!
Honestly, it's been so long since I used Bodhi (at least 5 years) and, as I mentioned, it wasn't even being maintained when I last checked, that I can't remember for sure if its installation on an old HP laptop needed anything extra, like WiFi drivers. This was circa the days of using
ndiswrapper [at a command line...*sigh*] to even be able to use wireless with the infamous Broadcom 43xx window$-only card. I can't even remember now which HP laptop that was...it was before my dv7...I just can't think of it. But my point being, it was OLD at the time. I had installed the then-current Kubuntu version on it, and that's when it said, nope!, can't do this... It ran like frozen molasses! So instead of downgrading back to the previous Kubuntu, I went in search of a lightweight distro and found Bodhi, and liked it a lot, and recommended it for resurrecting old hardware. I'm happy to hear it's apparently been resurrected itself!
I'd do what's been suggested, try other distros. I refuse to believe that in 2019 there exists a Linux that doesn't do wireless out of the box.