I said stm8 but there are a lot's of cheap microcontroller, I don't know what you use to program your esp32 but you should have a look at platform.io . I use that list
https://registry.platformio.org/search?t=platform&p=1 to select MCU's for my projects.
The thing I like the most about it is that I don't have to manually install and managed various tool chains and it's a lot more flexible than the Arduino ide.
