What if I told you that you can have both?
For me it's ctrl when I hold it down and use it with another key and esc when I press it briefly.
Can be set up on a Mac with Karabiner Elements.
If you told me that, I'd give you the +1. But Karabiner Elements doesn't work on my Arch box.
I have a udev rule that does the ESC mapping, but will have to try harder to see if I can make it do that on Linux.