> Well there's the use case of a device which gathers data and then uses its radio once every handful of hours to report that data to some service.

This is exactly a thing the ESP32 with WiFi cannot do if powered by a standard alkaline battery. The battery would drain in a couple of weeks.

And on top of that, it probably doesn't work at all, as it cannot even send once because the peak power draw is too high for an alkaline battery.