The D1 Mini actually has it's own shield format, and several shields are available. Even experienced people will find value in the ability to just plug in a display, or other device and use already available libraries. Maybe not great for production work, but great for prototyping and learning.
I think the big downfall with any ESP8266 board compared to others is going to be power consumption, even with WiFi off. So anyone not plugging theirs into a wall should do some research in that area.
[0] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13664 [1] https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/RTC
edit: Oh sorry I missed the "with wifi" in your post. One nice thing about the ESP8266 is that lots of people use it -- hopefully that means you can find details on how to run it in low power modes.
If you don't need actual WiFi, and instead just need wireless communication, there are other lower power modules you can use like the nrf24l01, LoRa, and other generic "Wireless Tranceivers". If you need them to have internet access, you can create a gateway which the remote modules communicate with, then have a ESP8266 plugged into the wall to proxy the requests.
Great value - program them as if they were an arduino
I set up a thermal sensor that updates a Parse (remember them!) clone. Working well but sometimes it just stops updating, not sure if it is the device or the Parse clone's fault or a bit of both. But it works nicely for a day or so at a time.
Just a reminder things might not go smoothly with these devices, they are tricky to debug if they crash. When you are communicating via http the apis are not as nice as I am used to on the desktop.
Does there exist a similar board with an ESP32?
It seems like small power-efficient microcontrollers have made enormous progress over the past decade, and we have an opportunity for the PC revolution all over again. The ESP32 is a little bit power-hungry, but it's also a proper CPU; it has two 240MHz cores, a few hundred kilobytes of RAM, an extra low-power core that can wake the main system up from sleep, and an MPU that can keep track of 8 process IDs per core including 2 privileged ones. People used to make do with less. It also has WiFi and Bluetooth and these days you can even write programs for it in Python.
I'd love to see more people thinking about the problems in their lives with relation to a $20 bin of modern parts. Sensors, displays, and actuators have made similar progress, and the possibilities are endless. But the pool of people trying to realize them is finite and way too small.
https://steve.fi/Hardware/helsinki-tram-times/
But you also find out about constraints too. Driving an epaper display without running out of RAM was a fun challenge:
I actually have a tough time explaining just how incredible this board is. You can program it in the Arduino environment, meaning if you are doing any hobby electronics, you're probably already really familiar with the programming modalities.
It comes with a programmer, and power regulator. No fussing with anything like you might have to with a bare ESP8266.
It also has WiFi. It is the magic internet of things that I swear everybody was dreaming about 5 years ago. Go buy 10 of them. They're my favorite favorite favorite general purpose dev board right now, and actually they're so cheap that I have no problem putting them into "finished products"[1].
Here they are for about $3: (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/ESP8266-ESP-12F-CH340-CH340G...)
[1]: I build custom/one-off large scale installation pieces and hardware prototypes. Almost every single one of them has an arduino-ish device in it somewhere.