I did get a response from the pioarduino team.

It's something you have to explicitly update, either by using the OTA apis, or by connecting to the UART on the ESP32C6.

They also don't recommend using anything lower than version 2.6.6 due to some issues, but I'm not sure if the issues are ...

Thanks. I've tried the pioarduino discord channel. They seem to prefer that to issue reports, at least for the first go around.

I'm using a Waveshare ESP32-P4-WIFI6-DEV-KIT board (https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/ESP32-P4-WIFI6-DEV-KIT), with the lastest pioarduino (Arduino Release v3.3.4 based on ESP-IDF v5.5.1.251106) , and I'm getting the following message in the log when I wifi.begin, wifi.status, etc.

waiting for Wifi ...