Some more reading. iwd is in the repo of Void, Alpine and Devuan. Seems ligit, so I compiled it.
The compilation was a little odd. One of the dependencies has to be detarred alongside the iwd source and then they both get compiled. Aside from that, not difficult. DESTDIR worked with make install.
I ran the daemon /lib/libexec/iwd in a root shell, then ran the text interface controller, iwctl.
Although my wifi uses the new-style name of wlp13s0, and despite iwd being a newer program, it showed my wifi as wlan0. Erm OK? I connected to it. It even showed the signal strength as a string of *'s.
Dhcp handling is broken. I did more reading, set up the config file in /etc/iwd/ and enabled what seemed to be the right settings, restarted iwd and ... no dhcp. Near as I can tell, me having the dhcp client is what the problem is. It wants opendhcp or systemd's dhcp thingie. There was something about an internal dhcp funcion inside iwd but that for reasons unknown doesn't work either.
I've no ideas.