unfortunately yes, you have to open the box and read the label of the wifi chip, or if you have another working SO (like Android), retrieve the information in another way.
Thanks for the hint. Turns out I do have a pristine spare box lying around with its original Android installed.
The wifi card for H96 mini V8 is 024c b723 (Realtek rtl8723as/rtl8723bs).
I see that this driver is already in the kernel so I edited the dts and build configs, but compiling the kernel is too slow on the laptop that I'm using at the moment so I couldn't test anything.