If you are interested in deploying LoRa — the low power long-range wireless technology — you might enjoy [Rui Santos’] project and video about using the ESP32 with the Arduino IDE to implement LoRa.
I built a whole-home ad blocker with a $7 ESP32-S3 board - and it took just minutes ...
It's amazing what you can do with an ESP32 (or two).
My first foray into the IoT utilized the Espressif ESP8266, an SoC with 32-bit MCU and 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi built in. Since then, I have used many different module variants based on the microcontroller. So ...