Very few hobby designs that use more capable chips actually need more capable chips, and the added complexity - hardware and software - often bites hard.

That said, wifi is a major selling point, and you need a beefy 32-bit computer to run the protocol. This is the brilliance of ESP32: you can actually use it just as a wifi dongle for another microcontroller, but since it needs so much computing power, might as well give you some RAM and CPU to do your thing directly on the wifi chipset...