I am incluned with Paul_RB.
I would add that the LN298 is a huge power consumer.
I don't think anyone would recomend for battery use.
Not knowing if you have dozens of sensors or just a few, the ESP32 has more I/O that a ESP8266.
But to address your actual question.
The ESP-01 originally could not be programmed to act like an Arduino and was sold as a WiFi module.
There are lots of old pages showing how to do that. No one recommends that anymore. The ESP chips are far superior in speed amd memory.