I’m not sure if this is known to you; apologies in advance if I’m stating the bleeding obvious: In Linux drivers come with the kernel. There shouldn’t be any reason, except a few exceptions, to install drivers separately to your kernel. So when Linux folks talk about “the kernel”, they mean “the scheduler, core operating system AND all up-to-date drivers”.
So most likely your HW isn’t supported in older kernels.
When I first installed 22.04 LTS for a 12700T-based micro server, several things didn’t work out of the box. After upgrading to 5.19 everything was in working order though.