I have one of the Wemos C3 pico boards which rely on the C3's native USB serial controller. The experience is pretty rough for quick iterations on a devboard on Windows.
You restart the board to programming mode by holding down the BOOT button down while pressing RESET. Wait a few seconds, then COM7 is available. You program the board, and then manually RESET the board with the button. COM7 disappears. Then you wait a few seconds, then COM6 appears. Oh, did you print some debug info on boot? Too bad, it takes a few seconds for the virtual serial port to appear in Windows so you just can't get input during that time because the reset resets the USB controller as well (the entire chip).
This is the benefit of on-board USB-UART chips: if you need to reset the chip, your USB controller doesn't need to be reset so your serial port stays open. Additionally, most ESP32 dev boards offer automatic reset by utilizing the DTR or RTS pins of the UART chip and a couple of transistors.
No button presses necessary (there are no buttons even, I have a slide switch on my PCB but almost never need to use it), everything resets automatically (except when it's in deep sleep, then I need to unplug it and plug it in again), I see log lines from the very first line in `app_main()`, etc.
I'm using a recent version of the ESP-IDF framework including all its tools (there is a VS Code extension that has a `Build, Flash and Monitor` button, I think all the operations are just run using the `idf.py` script, but not sure).
You restart the board to programming mode by holding down the BOOT button down while pressing RESET. Wait a few seconds, then COM7 is available. You program the board, and then manually RESET the board with the button. COM7 disappears. Then you wait a few seconds, then COM6 appears. Oh, did you print some debug info on boot? Too bad, it takes a few seconds for the virtual serial port to appear in Windows so you just can't get input during that time because the reset resets the USB controller as well (the entire chip).
This is the benefit of on-board USB-UART chips: if you need to reset the chip, your USB controller doesn't need to be reset so your serial port stays open. Additionally, most ESP32 dev boards offer automatic reset by utilizing the DTR or RTS pins of the UART chip and a couple of transistors.