Oh the Planck is neat, the visible circuitry. The main thing for me is I need to have the arrow keys and the top row keys have to be the esc/numbers.

That's a good idea. So far cherry MX reds are my daily driver with the curving square key caps (don't know the name yet) as opposed to the round ones.

I tried gatteron yellow but too hard and gatteron red too soft ha.

With gmk you can set the esc key to tlde, and then a "short long press" to esc on the same key

Why not map escape to caps lock with QMK or VIA? If you cannot miss your caps lock, place that behind a layer. There are quite some options to tackle this as long as you can flash a custom keymap.

The traditional remapping for esc is pressing alt, because the alt key sends the escape key in terminals.

Being able to fiddle with your keyboard layout is part of the fun of mechanicals, I happen to have this remapped at the OS level, because even on a laptop keyboard (yes I have a physical escape key) it's more convenient 90% of the time to press left Alt than the reach my pinky all the way up into Esc land.