If I'm not mistaken a very significant part of that is due to hobbyist interest in the chips, not in the least by Sprite_tm (also a HN user, now employed by Espressif).
The ESP8266 essentially started out as a wifi modem, responding to AT commands transmitted over serial, but going from there to a full standalone device relied on a lot of work by enthusiasts[0] and a leaked proprietary SDK[1].