The D1 Mini is my favorite ESP8266 board right now. It has built-in WiFi of course. It is physically smaller than a NodeMCU, but still exposes enough GPIO pins to allow interesting peripherals. The built-in micro-USB connector and USB-Serial chip means that programming it is easy, it doesn't need a separate programmer like the ESP-01. Unlike the ESP-01, the D1 Mini exposes the GPIO16 pin (aka D0) which is required to wake the board from DEEP SLEEP. The ESP-01 requires a soldering hack to enable DEEP SLEEP.
The LDO voltage regulator on the D1 Mini is so good that in DEEP SLEEP mode, it consumes only about 200 microamps, so I use it directly in battery-operated applications. In comparison, the ESP-01 goes down to 40 microamps in DEEP SLEEP, so the overhead of the voltage regulator is only about 160 microamps. (Edit: Both of those numbers include the DHT-22 temperature sensor).
My outdoor temperature sensor uses a D1 Mini with 3 x AA NiMH batteries feeding the voltage regulator, and it lasts 4 months. It wakes up for 5 seconds, every 15 minutes, reads the temperature and battery voltage, then transmits the info to an MQTT server. In theory, the ESP-01 (w/ soldering hack) would last 6 months on those batteries, but the difference isn't worth the extra hassle of an ESP-01 for me.
My biggest gripe about the NodeMCU honestly is that it's almost impossible to find one without the headers pre-soldered. The D1 Mini and the other microcontrollers I recommended all can be bought without headers soldered.
Headers pre-soldered is a big dealbreaker for me. I almost exclusively use JST-EH connectors for personal projects in place of headers. They are 2.5mm spaced so they fit in 0.1" spaced pins, and are much more secure than headers and won't easily get pulled out and jumbled up.
I used a Wemos D1 ESP8266 in this project [0]. Plenty good for the project at hand. I heard they have an ESP32 version now?
For one-off personal projects I'd probably still reach for a TinyPICO or FeatherS2 though because of the additional features they have, and that they have a Discord server you can ask questions to, but if you're deploying a dozen of them in your garden and want to save money then yeah, the Wemos would probably be a good bet. Support and documentation is a little sparse though, in comparison.
A great thing about the ESP32 in my experience is the 5v out. 3.3v can often power things that claim to need 5v, but bad things happen, like reboots. Some claim to have had damage too, but that hadn’t been my experience.
I don't know too much about its battery management, though. The microusb port seems like a good thing?