I've been using an Adafruit HUZZAH ESP8266 which has to be manually put into bootloader mode before uploading instructions via USB to TTL cable. Apparently that isn't necessary on some ESP8266 modules? Apparently some modules will go into bootloader mode automatically? Does it make a difference whether you're using NodeMCU versus Arduino IDE? I've never used NodeMCU/Lua.
Incidentally, can NodeMCU/Lua have the FFS or is that just for Arduino?