Not just price- Espressif has done a really good job making their SDK and hardware documentation available to overseas hobbyists. Even hiring an English speakin

Not just price- Espressif has done a really good job making their SDK and hardware documentation available to overseas hobbyists. Even hiring an English speaking dev to work SDK features that people were asking for in English, and doing a good job communicating with/engaging with the community. They're not great if you're coming from solely-software land, but their SDK and dev experience (you can just use the Arduino IDE for a gentler learning curve, step up to FreeRTOS, esp-idf, or go more bare-metal) is still leaps and bounds ahead of competitors, like the STM32CUBE cluster fuck...using their Hal was the only time in my life where deleting whitespace in C code could break a build. If the developer experience is awful, it doesn't matter that the STM32 chips perform better per second and per watt than an ESP32.