It has never been a question of computing power or memory, that was already solved decades ago. It is a question of fitting the µC to the application. Price and power consumption are usually the qestions to be answered. 0,50$ or 2$ chip still makes a difference.
I think ESPXXXs usually have < 500kb ram. Still quite tight.
I believe Arduino has a C++ transpiler. I would almost prefer Javascript here, although you could just use C as a subset.