Espressif ESP

I'm an amateur with this stuff and honestly find the ESP experience significantly more pleasant than Arduino. I'm sure there are footguns I haven't encountered, but I get so much more bang for the buck out of random ESP builds + the incredible line of various bundled ESP devices that come with touchscreens, sensors, etc. for incredibly low prices.

Sounds to me like another nail in the coffin for Arduino as a useful tool for hobbyists. That said I stopped buying Arduinos years ago and started buying super low cost ESPs from China and I think most other people did too so I guess it's not going to be a huge blow

Specs matter, but differently, at least for me. I don't need the best performing chip out there, I just want an efficient chip. I love having a simple ESP chip that I can connect some wires to and flash ESPHome on. When I was a kid I only dreamed of such simplicity and efficiency. Especially with things such as Raspberry Pi's, which makes DIY computing really affordable too.

The idea was that a Pi makes sense sometimes, and other times it doesn't. I know people using a Pi for one GPIO pin. This can be done just fine with an Arduino or an ESP8266. I for one run a Pi with PiHole, Wireguard, Unifi controller, NVR, MQTT, etc. and a few more GPIO trinkets like Zwave. No ESP could practically handle all that, an x86 would be overkill in terms of size, noise, temperature, and power consumption. On the other hand I use ESPs for things like "smartening up" my door intercom where even a Pi Zero would be overkill.

I find the ATTiny85 difficult, since you have to connect a programmer to it. I tried the Digispark clones but then you lose the low-power advantages. I'm usually trying to work out problems with my crappy code so I need a connection all the time to iterate. So I prefer the ESPs or Arduino Pro Micro.

yeah, ESPs aren't general purpose computers but they are still very capable (I used one as a "router" before to create a network in my car: https://github.com/martin-ger/esp_wifi_repeater )

That is a very different situation, ESP8266 looks highly appealing if you need it in bulk. Optimize the app into a low resource C program and live happily ever after. Look at what all the best volume manufactured custom and smart devices are based on these days.. it's ESP :) Esphome makes life easy.

Arduino is in the lifecycle stage where they need to accelerate extraction. Unfortunate for some maybe, but as a hobbyist, the ESP hardware and software offerings are miles ahead anyway.

Compiling code is the easy part, peripheral drivers which implement both the basic Arduino functions (digitalWrite and so on and so forth) and more advanced stuff like SPI/I2C, WiFi, etc. are necessary to make a working "Arduino ecosystem." I think the reason that ESP was so successful is they provided both a working Arduino standard library so that sketches could just be copy-pasted from other platforms, and a reasonably decent real RTOS-backed development environment (ESP-IDF) for once users outgrew the Arduino training wheels.

Using a Raspberry Pi is very wasteful in the first place. If it's powered from USB, it doesn't really matter, but if you want to power it from batteries (especially something like AAA NiMH batteries) so that you can easily hang it on a wall somewhere and make it last a month or so (refresh every 10-15 minutes maybe), you pretty much have to use something much more low power (like an ESP8266, ESP32, etc.). Having pre-stored pictures is also unnecessary, just generate them on the fly. Unless generating the picture takes a long time (e.g. having to contact a lot of slow external services), you can just draw it on the server in memory with each request. In the same request, the device can also send its battery voltage to the server, where you can collect it as metrics.