AC is super easy with ESPHome, eg:

https://esphome.io/components/climate/climate_ir.html

TV also:

https://esphome.io/components/remote_transmitter.html

Sure, have a look at the source in my repo. I bitbang the pulses in a naive way. I realized later that everyone uses the same protocol and reading about it first would have been better, but it wasn't hard to bitbang anyway.