I can offer a fellow-user perspective on this, but I’m sure the Genode developers can say more.

1. Is Wifi on the T430 supposed to work? I couldn't get it to do more than scanning. There are some teensy tiny error messages in the logs, so if it helps I could get out my magnifier and share them

I haven’t used the default wifi driver so can’t say specifically, but in porting the ath9k one I dug into the wifi code a bit so if you post the error I can give it a look if you like.

2. Persistence - what about persistence? I picked the ram-fs per the getting started document, but I would like to save SOME stuff- say bookmarks and source code, how do I do that?

If Sculpt recognizes your storage it will show you the partitions available. If you create a partition called “GENODE”, you can then make it active (“GENODE*”) and Sculpt will recognize it by default. This is documented in the Sculpt instructions here: https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-22-10. If your storage isn’t recognized is it NVMe? There was an issue affecting that driver that’s since been fixed: https://github.com/genodelabs/genode/commit/8bd548416d0b6a5f532151b97f2133dfb548b5bb

3. I read that the genode folks use Sculpt as their daily drivers - so I'm guessing they don't boot from USB,

You can boot Sculpt from a hard drive (if you use grub already), simply copy the ”boot” folder to a hard drive partition and amend your system’s main grub cfg copying the commands in boot/grub/grub.cfg.