I understand the fact that it was dumbed down but it is unfortunate that if can't also be smartened up by work arounds. It is very convenient to buy boards farther than chips avoiding having to solder paste bare chips to a custom board.
I now have used a handful of different boards many now are upgraded via OTA. The OTA at least for esp32 does show the board in the ports list next to the IP. However it is possible to upload code to the wrong board by accident. This nearly resulted in an electrical fire when the wrong pin assignment flipped a relay.
I suspect I can work around this by including a well named h file that contains the board constraints for electrical safety and giving it the ability to stop compilation success.
Using the standard GPIO numbers and always generic boards even if using a brand name board is a good suggestion in that it is safer.
I am now aware of the hidden risks in dumbed down code and ways to avoid them.
Thanks