Quick and easy question: what is the currently preferred breakout for the ESP32? With the ESP8266, I always went well with the Wemos D1 Mini, but the Lolin D32 is still not properly documented. I would like to have something that will be available for a while to make some standard boards.
If you're making custom PCBs based on it, use the ESP module, and provide your own supporting circuitry. Soldering it isn't hard, nor are the external circuits that difficult (though if you want to have on-board USB serial, it's a bit more annoying, but why? Just put a pin header on it and use an external adapter)
If you insist on using breakout boards, I'm not sure which ESP32 board will win, I would be tempted to buy enough of a type I liked to supply the planned project.
Agree with DrAzzy, if your building 'standard boards' why not just add the ESP32 WROOM to the board directly ?
The ESP32 WROOM module is easy to solder and is likley to be available for quite a long time.
With your own board design you can dump the USB to serial chip and use a cheap external USB-Serial adapter for programming instead. This arrangement gets the standby current down to a miserly 8uA or so when using a regulator such as MCP1700.
If you need the WiFi then uses a stronger voltage regulator but you can still keep the sleep current down to 30uA or so. There are as far as I am aware no commercial ESP32 boards that get the sleep current this low.
Of the ESP32 boards that have the circuitry and connections for LiPo batteries, I dont know of one which will switch off the board\battery if the LiPo voltage gets real low. This is not a safe way to use LiPo batteries, so I dont see the point of this 'feature'.
Sometimes, it is quite handy to just add another board, because it essentially gives free layers. For the Wemos D1 Mini, I have a board where a switching regulator board fits under the the breakout board.
But for what I have in mind currently, you may be right.