Not surprised, there’s some very capable chips that aren’t fully utilized, I think a lot of smart watches have a certain Nordic chip too. Know of any more ESP like chips?
A ucontroller with way more compute and peripherals than it need for it's task, with either no or shoddy encryption on it's flash allowing you to write your own code or binary patch the existing code with a little elbow grease? That's most microcontrollers out there with the exception of chips by Broadcom (no flash and the patch RAM is already basically full fixing bugs in their crappy code ROM) or Nordic (because of the ubiquitous use of per device encrypted flash). Specific devices I've worked on in that capacity though are all tied up in NDAs with my employers though.
But what makes ESPs special is the community. Because of all of the public work put into them, it's an order of magnitude easier to manipulate them than pouring over a disassembly. You'd know about tchips like that if they existed. Bunnie tried to get that kind of community around the MT6260 chips, but it didn't really go anywhere.