Raspberry Pi Zero W flashed with official Raspberry Pi OS 12 (Debian bookworm).
Set to US wifi settings in the Pi Foundation's official Imager.
rfkill list all
shows transmitting is enabled. (RFkill is off.)
iwlist scanning wlan0
shows the Pi Zero can see our five household Access Points.

The Access Point is a Raspberry Pi 3B (no plus) running hostapd (default settings) and ISC dhcpd. We can see other devices getting on its wifi network segment successfully.
tail -f /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd.leases

The Pi Zero W never gets a lease. If it's transmitting, the AP doesn't see it.

Solution: Disable a wifi feature called wmm in the Access Point. It's not busy enough to need to prioritize video streams so we really don't need the feature.
In /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf, add the line
wmm_enabled=0
and restart hostapd.
sudo systemctl restart hostapd

This may not be the only solution. No other model of Raspberry or Orange Pi seems to have the problem. But a Raspberry Pi W that can't get on wifi is fairly useless, and I hope this solution keeps a few of them in service and out of the e-waste bin.