The software stacks available are probably going to be more battle-tested. I'm also curious if there's more potential in resuscitating legacy code at the "application" level, if you knew you could run it in an embedded box which drew a fraction of a watt. Maybe all you really need is something that already existed as a DOS application.
However, it's comparing apples and freight locomotives. The main part of the x86 historic story revolved around desktop computing and keyboard-mouse-screen interactions[1], and the ESP32's is about internet-of-things and GPIOs, so even if the x86 module is beefier, it's tooling and connectivity may not be what you want out of the box if you were considering an ESP32.
On the other hand, we do see some places where they're clearly trying to hammer things like low-end ARM and ESP32 into vaguely more screen-and-keyboard things. I'm thinking of things like dedicated word-processor appliances (Alphasmart, etc.) or 300-in-1 knockoff consoles, where you could reasonably implement them as a 586-class CPU running off-the-shelf-software.
[1] Yes, I know full well there are loads of embedded x86 environments that look nothing like a PC. In university, our assembly language course involved setting up an 80186 developer board tethered to an ADM-3 terminal to be the world's most expensive digital clock.
well.
That crap is so much smaller than modern L3 caches and dark silicon.
It wouldn't. Not to mention you'd have to bring all the x86 arch crap with it.
But you can now do that reimplementation, the P5 is more than 20 yrs old now.