does your machine have a hardware on/off switch for wireless?
in my case doing "ip link set up wlan0" returns "not possible due to rf kill" until i enable wifi by pressing fn (function key) + F2 in my laptop
(not just for debian, but also for any other distro i've tried)
you say you have tried this, but maybe you didn't press the right combination of keys due to them having been configured differently than the wifi symbol you presumably have on the f12 might imply
in windows i don't have to do this either, so this case seems similar
(for my brother's laptop i have to do it even when using windows, however)
see if hotkey + f12 disables wifi while you're on windows, if it doesn't then there might be your problem
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