This is a little bit more interactive and detail-oriented. I think they also have flashy onesheet PDFs that are more marketing oriented.

And just like any build system for everything language/stack, there is a small group of hardcore "enthusiasts" who create and push their true build tech to rule them all and then there is the large majority of people who have to deal with it and just want to build the damn thing.

That alone puts US-based sellers at a mega disadvantage compared to cheap Chinese goods - and it's not a good thing.

If all you need is Zigbee/BLE and a few IO pins, an nRF52840 dongle is still $10 on DigiKey.

Maybe not applicable for this new one, but that's my understanding for the S3/C5 models. (something like 16mb NAND and 8mb PSRAM)

It also says 320 KB of ROM, which seems low. Judging from the product name (DevKitC-1-N8R4) and their other products, it has 8 MB of flash.

Pinout for the dev board.

One of the main reasons RISC-V is gaining popularity is that companies can implement their own cores (or buy cheaper IP cores than from ARM) and take advantage of existing optimizing compilers. Espressif are actually a perfect example; the core they used before (Xtensa) was esoteric and poorly supported and switching to RISC-V gives them better toolchain support right out of the gate.

The reason is that CPU cores only form a tiny part of the SOC, the rest of the SOC is proprietary and likely to be documented to whatever level the company needs and the rest if available hidden under layers of NDA's. Just because the ISA is open source does not mean you know anything about the rest of the chip.

saying that, the C5 is a nice SOC, and it is nice that we have some competition to ARM.

This transition happened so quickly that most people haven't fully cought up to the implications to the full extent. In my mind, China is already the center of gravity.