Could be propaganda as well - why not scare the monkeys with the bad Chinese? Without ESPs the market is so much easier to control.

Note:I use both the ES8266ex and different ESP32s in my projects.

Halo 1 and 2

Esp-home also works with the older esp-01 - it was released as a wifi module so there are only two gpio’s, but thats enough for a lot of home automation stuff.

Here’s one i have connected to HA, where HA uses rest-api to capture some data from a game called tacticus, and it shows my available tokens for guild raid and arena

Heres the top google link i found: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/how-to-flash-a-custom-firmware-to-sonoff/

Esp-home is available as a HA addin, docs here: https://esphome.io/

Too much fanfare and too little real info shared to be of any value. Sounds more like an ad than infosec

You can already reflash a lot of devices for this purpose. And you could use esp-home to customise once reflashed

In other news: tesla bans third party gas pumps