It doesn't look like there is a battery in there (and there was no talk of deep sleep..) but at the same time this is not a true USB peripheral, there is a FTDI

It doesn't look like there is a battery in there (and there was no talk of deep sleep..) but at the same time this is not a true USB peripheral, there is a FTDI or similar chip that's talking USB but the ESP is only talking serial with that chip. So there isn't any scope for the ESP taking over its host by pretending to be a keyboard or similar. But at the same time we are talking about using a 66 MHz processor and WLAN chip to connect all around the world to some Slack data center that then does a bunch of internal handling that is then at some point through another few world roundtrips received at his desk computer, a whopping metre away from the ESP and connected through a serial line. And no shit, all that nonsense is making the simple button press take seconds and for no good reason at all. To relay a hint from people standing a few feet away. In other words, this fits right in with the IoT crowd!