Interesting. I control all sorts of things around my house using a raspberry pi with thr Linux version of this capability, LIRC. Heat pump, stereo, TV. Might be more fun to try on arduino. I wonder if it works with esp8266.
Next thing you can do is to choose an esp8266 target within the Arduino environment and see if it compiles.
Those two things would be enough to satisfy me that it's worth actually giving it a whirl. More expensive hardware would demand more extensive research.