We usually require more pins, but if medium-sized ESP32-C3 modules are priced near the ESP8266-12-style modules, we can’t see any reason to buy the latter; for us it will literally be an ESP8266 ...

Normally, you wouldn’t be able to do that without extra parts, but on the ESP32, [BastelBaus] has found a nice hack — just connect your devices to different pins and slightly abuse the ESP32 ...

We made something similar but using the RP2350A board, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2, and published a guide on how to get Wi-Fi on the Pico 2 using an ESP32 ... with more GPIO pins than the RP2350A ...