Up until recently, at least, ESP8266 boards were far more finicky. Even today, for a simple task that didn't need wifi, I'd probably trust an Arduino a little m

Up until recently, at least, ESP8266 boards were far more finicky. Even today, for a simple task that didn't need wifi, I'd probably trust an Arduino a little more than an ESP'. It may also be partially a software thing - there are a lot of libraries that were written for Arduinos and then adapted to mostly work on ESP's. This too has been improving recently. And, as others have mentioned, Arduinos have better built-in analog support.