For future reference I recommend the brand “athom” for smart light bulbs, they come flashed with tasmota, wled or esphome and you can also flash whatever you want on them

You can disable the facial recognition, so that shouldn’t be an issue

https://github.com/xvzc/SpoofDPI

So instead of giving them little money, you want to give them absolutely nothing

All you’d need to program that ESP32 is an USB to UART adapter, you can get those for pennies on the dollar. I’ve never used Ethernet on the ESP32 so I can’t attest to how easy it would be, however I do know that doing it over WiFi is super simple.

Probably cheaper to just use an ESP8266 or the like

Would appreciate it