What you get when you pick a board is not just the raw specs, but also the community, apis, and documentation. I choose to buy Adafruit products because I know they will be documented and supported for a long time.
The problem with the ESP32 is that it has some pretty insane peak power draw figures (nearly an amp at times, far higher than the official spec of ~300mA) that catch people off guard in low power battery applications, and the dev/carrier board quality varies a fair bit. A lot of early 8266 and 32 boards had quite high power drain just from the board itself; things like poorly chosen resistor networks for battery voltage monitoring, for example. You used to be able to find reviews covering this sort of thing but that information seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Wemos/Lolin and 1-2 others are the main/best suppliers for ESP boards, generally.
Which one? There’s huge variety of ESP32 modules out there. I’ve been using various since introduction (and before that, the 8266) and don’t recall ever running into this. Do you have some links to share?
The claimed power draw in the data sheets with the modem on is sustained over 200 ma. Part of the problem is that the modem doesn’t have granular control. If you want BLE, which should only consume a few ma, you have to also turn on wifi, which needs a ton of power.