I mainly use ESP8266, as it’s cheaper but it’s less powerful and doesn’t have 5v output, just 3.3v (or at least the ones I have were like this). I don’t have any real coding skill but between the Arduino IDE, ESPHome, MQTT and some mucking about, I got where I wanted to be.

The sensors are so inexpensive and there are so many (light, temperature, fire, smoke, moisture, humidity, distance, gasses, weight, open/close, current etc). It’s really impressive what is out there.

If you're just starting out I can recommend looking at m5 which has nice little kits to get started. It's a bit pricier though. https://m5stack.com