[civilitty]

That has not been my experience at all as a user. ESPHome is even easier than Arduino and I haven’t touched firmware code in years.

The price makes a huge difference when you have dozens of them operating which is trivial with a decent hydroponics and smarthome setup. I also have a dozen boards just sitting idle ready to be called up to replace a failed one or use for a new project because they’re so cheap.

Not to mention the Arduino core is supported officially by ESP32: https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32

Who actually uses Arduino in production? Everyone just uses modules (for ESP32) or rolls their own using the Arduino board as a reference. They’re so simple the NRE is definitely worth the unit cost if you’re already rolling a daughter board at 1k units.