What dev board you use has no bearing on the firmware you can use for the ESP8266 and you can flash it for whatever firmware you want as long as there is enough

What dev board you use has no bearing on the firmware you can use for the ESP8266 and you can flash it for whatever firmware you want as long as there is enough flash memory, be it NodeMCU (Lua), Arduino, etc (they're all built on top of the native Espressif frameworks, regardless). All non-trivial firmware on the ESP8266 requires binary blobs from Espressif to run, however.