I struggle to understand the appeal of these more premium ESP32 boards. I’m gonna throw the same code on it. It’s an ESP32 either way. What exactly am I buying here for that 3x price

Just for prototyping ease tbh.

You would always make a custom board for an actual mass appeal product. If it's not a mass made product why do you care? Pick the easiest one regardless of cost.

This is essentially a dev kit. With the ability to easily mess with it. You don't care about the cost here because it's not really an expense when amortized.

Prototyping with an ESP32 is a lot easier with a $6 breakout board [1]. Still comes out cheaper than TFA Nano without headers.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/KeeYees-Breakout-ESP-WROOM-32-Microco...

This looks to have better software with it though. I get that you can probably port between but i'm happy to pay a few dollars to save my own time here.

We're talking $4 vs $16 for a board for engineers that cost much more than that an hour. Pick whatever you like. In fact go buy both and play with both the above and this. The cost is literally nothing. These boards are not what goes into a large production run product.

The price makes a huge difference when you have dozens of them operating which is trivial with a decent hydroponics and smarthome setup. I also have a dozen boards just sitting idle ready to be called up to replace a failed one or use for a new project because they’re so cheap.

Not to mention the Arduino core is supported officially by ESP32: https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32

Who actually uses Arduino in production? Everyone just uses modules (for ESP32) or rolls their own using the Arduino board as a reference. They’re so simple the NRE is definitely worth the unit cost if you’re already rolling a daughter board at 1k units.