Same. I had a couple extra ESP boards from an order where I only needed one, an extra breadboard and humidity/temp sensor and decided to finally measure the temp out in the greenhouse. It's amazing to have all that in a grafana dash running on a r pi.
I'd say install home assistant, and get a device that runs ESPhome, so you can tweak it. Unfortunately I don't really have anything more specific than that, but I agree that ESPhome is great. You solder some stuff, define the pins in the config, and everything works.
