The Arduino IDE is very limiting. It hides a lot of these important implementation details in an attempt to keep things simple and easy to switch between Ardui

The Arduino IDE is very limiting. It hides a lot of these important implementation details in an attempt to keep things simple and easy to switch between Arduino-like devices (which is fine for users who aren't doing complex stuff or want all the features out of their particular chip or care much about optimization). I would instead recommend to use Espressif's SDK directly (https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp8266-rtos-sdk/en/latest/get-started/index.html https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp8266-rtos-sdk/en/late...) so they have access to all the API the SDK offers.