Great info, with this caveat:
> I would happily recommend it if you can live with the state of bluetooth/wifi not being awesome quite yet.
ESP32's main niche is embedded WiFi and Btle. With Bluetooth there are some alternatives, but Espressif is the nicest. For Wi-Fi, there are no integrated alternatives I'm aware of. So, if I'm on ESP, it's probably because of WiFi and/or Btle, which makes IDF appealing.
I know. I actually use to get easily integrated lora without hats, etc (through heltec's ESP stuff), along with bluetooth for updates.
But the state is why i couldn't use baremetal at the time - the firmware kept crashing.
For this kind of thing, NRF's softdevices are a much nicer alternative and work fine in embassy.