Starting with the recommended schematic for the ESP32, the most obvious things to remove are a number of the interfacing components like the USB to UART chip ... of the GPIO pins, but he figures ...

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 ...

A hidden ESP32 feature could let attackers spoof devices, steal data, and install malware. Let's Understand What is it? How to Handle it?

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 ...