Now, the TinyPICO is more expensive than some ESP32 boards but that's because it's been engineered well and is manufactured in Australia by a maker that goes out of his way to support his products.
The benefit of the tinopico is build quality, physical size, more ram (4M instead of 1M if I remember), and battery life, and a three color led on the board instead of 1 color . For a small quantity home project where any of that matters, like a wearable, tinypico is good, if it is a plug in system where a centimeter doesn't matter, I chose espressif, who is the company who builds the chip and does the support (esp32.com) and open sources the dev environment.
In one project where we needed 100 controllers we ended up on esp8266. It was a few years ago ('19) when prices were a little higher. We bought them on AliExpress and had a high failure rate (50 pct?) And still did ok because they were 2 bucks each. After throwing away the doa ones, they were perfectly reliable. Project success, and 25 buck parts would have blown budget.
* Those cheap ESP32 boards are a massive pain to flash and do dev work on because they use cheap usb serial interfaces or omit them entirely. The CP2104 is much more reliable and the TinyPICO has properly implemented the DTS triggers to put the board into the right mode when you flash it.
* The pico uses a high performance micro antenna rather than a basic strip line so your wifi connection is also more reliable.
* The pico has a much better LDO and power supply - one of the biggest headaches with cheap ESP32 boards is power brownouts during wifi negotiation.
* Those cheap ESP32 boards all implement the exact same transistor based reset for DTR/RTS, they all work with `idf.py monitor`
* There are many options for ESP32 dev boards with an entire external antenna
All that leaves is... the LDO? Brownouts are solved by power caps, or a shorter USB cable. Or providing external power over VIN. Is that really worth double the price?
Like, if you're shipping it in a product you're probably not using a dev board (I hope you're not)
If you're just developing a prototype or tinkering, this is just like Arduino boards. High price, questionable benefit.
If you need extremely low power usage, get a plain module and one of the breakouts that lets you choose the LDO.
TinyPICO has 4MB Flash and 4MB extra PSRAM on top of the 520k SRAM plus the rest.
Esp32 is very common for led controls. Leds are usually plugged in. For those uses, tinypico buys me less than I hoped.