For small, cheap Wifi enabled gadgets the ESP8266 and ESP32 devices are hard to beat.
I have the ESP8266 SDK setup nicely on my linux system and have done some work with the ESP32.
This is pretty much a "recon mission" to find out what tools are available if I want to use my new mac to work with these chips.
The short answer is that the tools for the ESP32 are available, but not for the older ESP8266. You could conclude that the 8266 is obsolete and forgotten, but I have a bag with 10 of them -- and they work just fine for many projects.
Given that the ESP32 "IDF" (IDF = IoT development framework) is available, a person like me could probably get an ESP8266 setup patched together. The essential ingredient is the cross compiler (gcc for the xtensa). This is surely part of the ESP32 IDF and hopfully would contain flags to get it to generate code for the ESP8266.
Again, "why bother?". I can do all this on linux and have everything set up.
You could look into the Arduino IDE for the ESP8266. However, I hate Arduino development. I would only do that to extract gcc for xtensa from it, then would discard all the rest. There is also something called PlatformIO (that can be integrated with Visual Studio Code) -- which sounds like yet another direction I would prefer to avoid.I just want gcc, libraries, and I will write Makefiles.