Yeah, I'm regretting getting the esp8266 not knowing of the esp32. Besides being a better device for basically the same price, it has better tooling from espressif.
I have the opposite experience. Sure, if you just need to adapt their examples a bit, it's quite smooth. But the documentation is horrendous! If you need to do anything non-trivial that isn't covered by examples, I found it very very hard to work with. The documentation barely exists and is written in poor English. Compare this to the documentation for ARM SDKs, for example! Night and day.
I was comparing the Esp-idf to the Arduino libraries! The documentation isn't too bad, it's quite lengthy. The examples, tutorials online, and github issues in the idf repo help a lot too since the documentation doesn't dive into code examples too well.
Esp8266 doesnt have flash encryption and secure boot. Esp32-s2 does though.