That's not always the case, not even for a real Arduino Nano.
What you will see in device manager depends on the chip that provides the USB functionality.
Original Unos and Megas e.g. use the 16U2 which is a microcontroller that is programmed to identify the board as Uno or Mega. Clone boards often use a standard TTL-to-USB converter (most commonly used are CH340 or FT232 or CP2102) and the board will be identified by the OS based on that.
Your ESP8266 also uses one of those and hence you will not see Arduino in Windows device manager.
Note: the fact that you can program the ESP8266 with the IDE does not make the ESP8266 an Arduino.