I have been doing a lot of esp8266 web rest stuff the last few years. I recently am trying to get esp32 to work with my code and its been a lot of non-fun dealing with esp32.
esp8266 just plain works, its stable and I have devices that stay online (pingable, get'able) for months and even more than a year of uptime. cant say anything like that about esp32.
and now there's a new 'boards manager' for it.
just not happy that esp32 is too much of a moving target. I get why they update things but each major update breaks too much existing library and example code. very unprofessional.
so far, for things I need to work its the old esp8266 for me. wemos d1 most often.