Considering that ESP8266 and ESP32s are the backbone of many projects for many years, and their firmware mostly open source (i.e. you could remove WiFi/BT stack

Considering that ESP8266 and ESP32s are the backbone of many projects for many years, and their firmware mostly open source (i.e. you could remove WiFi/BT stacks), I'd be very surprised to find any naughty code calling back to China. It's also kind of the obvious place to look first if you wanted to prove allegations, meaning if the conspiracy theory was true, you'd not see it in here, but in custom variants sold specifically for single use applications in government equipment.