[briHass]

Depending on what you want to actually build, another option is ESPHome coupled with the Home Assistant ecosystem or standalone with MQTT. Most of the sensors, displays, etc. you'd want to interface with are supported, and everything is some simple YAML config. If you need more flexibility, it supports 'lambdas' which are snippits of any arbitrary C++ code you want, or you can write custom components in C++.

The big benefit to ESPHome is it handles all the 'boring' stuff like Wifi updates, timers, and API/MQTT glue code. I still write one-off stuff in PlatformIO, but most of my devices are running ESPHome with some custom code added on, because I don't feel like reinventing the wheel.