In addition to what others have mentioned if you're using Home Assistant or an MQTT environment than using the ESPHome tools can make life much easier.
You can also install MicroPython, and with it's new and improved "mip" (pip for micropython) you can easily find drivers for most things. Micropython doesn't support "threads" on the esp8266 as such, but can use uasyncio, which achieves the same goal.