I'm in a similar boat. If the board is small/simple enough and I'm only doing 1 or 2, then yeah, maybe I'd just do it with point to point wire and hot glue. But these days for anything complicated I'll just throw together a PCB. Yeah, it takes a week or two to arrive, but I'm usually busy getting parts, other parts of the project, or just life in general, so I plan around it and it's not an issue. These days the PCBs are so fast and cheap from China that it's almost never a question except for the simplest cases. It just saves SO much hands-on time to do. I ended up getting a bunch over the years from JLCPCB, and have always been happy with them. Now I don't even look at other shops, and just go to them each time. I've had very good luck with the ESPHome devices. I had issues with Mysensors, and needing things that were in the alpha code that never got released. I guess these days if you have Claude or ChatGPT go through it, maybe it wouldn't be so painful to find and fix the error. I just didn't have the time, and ESPHome, while it had a learning curve, already had support for the devices that I wanted to use. My wifi at home is rock solid, and can handle I don't know how many hundred devices, so that does help that the ESP devices don't have any incremental cost in that regard for me. As far as the 3.3V, that hasn't seemed to be much of an issue for years for me - most newer devices seem headed that way or even lower voltage once you get some of the higher performance chips. Anyway, not trying to argue that anyone is wrong, this is just my experience of it. :)