Not sure I'd call the silabs chips hyper exotic. The SIWG917 is intended as a direct competitor to ESP32s. It's a bit more expensive, but not unexpectedly so.

I'm not sure about WiFi, but JieLi (JL) definitely has a huge marketshare for single-chip BLE/BT. They are the origin of the infamous "the Bluetooth device is ready to pair" stock prompt voice.

oh there are a lots, it's just that they are not interested in Western market.

BES, Sifli, realtek, boufallo, etc.

> But no real competition for on-chip Wifi/BLE around.

No competition or no market?

I can't imagine Espressif is selling much volume of these chips.

The fact that they can't even fix their SPI module would tend to indicate that their engineering staff is very thin.