What kind of programmer does one need to work with ESP32? I bought jlink for stm32 thinking that's the ultimate programmer for all my needs, however it does not claim compatibility with esp32.
This doesn’t really answer your question, but it feels like it’s worth mentioning.
There are also 'premium' devkits with smaller and nicer packaging e.g. I like m5 devkits that are inch-by-inch-by-halfinch blocks at $7.5 for https://docs.m5stack.com/en/core/AtomS3%20Lite or with an integrated screen for $15.5 https://shop.m5stack.com/products/atoms3-dev-kit-w-0-85-inch... is useful for visual feedback.
If you use a bare module then you need a basic 3.3V serial adapter and maybe a jumper wire to ground pin 0 to enter programming mode.
You can also do stuff with JTAG, which will let you use a debugger, but that's not mandatory. Espressif sells a dirt cheap one. I think maybe you can use your jlink for that with some fiddling but I'm not certain.
Worth noting that this includes JTAG over USB.
But there are things they won't touch it seems, like LoRa support.
Also I might be wrong but so far I don't think you can leverage cool things like ESP-NOW (yet).
All of the provided controls are bad. It's incredibly difficult to get it on the network. The documentation is laughable.
It took me three hours to get a simple RGB strip working. All it had to do was drive three PWM signals. The esp has hardware specifically for that. It took a lot of effort to even find out how to use the LEDC hardware, much less how to assign a pin and hook it to the color picker.
I also wanted to hang an IR LED off it to control my TV and such. No sort of configurable button panel, you get one giant widget per action.
I did eventually get it working, but honestly it would have been so much faster to just write my own firmware to talk to HA directly.