Comment by ckocagil

Originally it was the more capable successor to ESP8266, the super cheap chip containing a high speed core with wifi and an IP stack. At one point it powered a huge chunk of all smart devices on the market. Then the original ESP32 was introduced as the successor, with BLE and two cores which were even faster. That made it a very capable chip for tasks demanding compute. After the original ESP32 they decided to add variety and make a whole "ESP32 family" and yes there's quite a lot of variety these days. Even the ISA and cores changed.