I don’t consider Wagner folks to be part of the Army, and their use in the war....opened up a ‘lab experiment’ of what you shouldn’t conduct in a war.
One odd aspect....because of crappy training and strategy over the past fifty years, the regular Russian Army was not prepared for this type of invasion. Wagner? It was designed for civil conflict in Africa or Asia. When you started mixing regular Army and Wagner...there was no central control or authority.
Russian Army recruits probably don’t want to fight Russians themselves, but Wagner folks probably don’t have that feeling in fighting Army members, if necessary.
I suspect that Prigozhin was brought in in part as political insurance by Putin. He had good reasons to doubt the loyalty and steadfastness of most of the army. They had already begun to organise a separate peace when under stress - Kharkiv and Kherson. Prigozhin was his “fixer”.