>If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that.

It's the opposite of that. Hobbyist/low volume maker gonna spend extra money to buy a familar tool, instead of going extra miles finding the cheapest available.

Even ESP32 is bad in term of perfomance/features and how much it cost.