This might be a little lengthy post since I saw a couple of posts talking about this problem but I couldn't find a solution on the forms or other places, so i thought I could share my way of fixing this issue. So if you don't have a ESP32 you might go along with your day. This post is made that you can start interacting with esp32 as fast as possible. It does not go into detail why things are the way they are, could be cool to know but I'm new to this. If you are facing any other problems let me know.

The ESP32 that I have can be bought - https://www.amazon.co.uk/AZDelivery-NodeMCU-CP2102-Development-Parent/dp/B07ZZFXRTY?th=1

Problems that I faced

When I plugged my USB cable inside ESP32 I saw the red light blink a couple of times and then it went silent. At first I did not think much of it since I heard the device connect to my computer USB connected sound. Also there was a new device that showed up on Device Manager. What made me think that it is a faulty product is that the red LED did not stay on. Many tutorials show that when plugging the USB red light was constant and did not blink. TLDR: it is okay for the red light to blink. Also my ESP32 did not connect when using Arduino IDE.

First things first - install drivers so that your computer can understand what device is being connected. The driver for my ESP32 could be found on this resource - https://www.silabs.com/developer-tools/usb-to-uart-bridge-vcp-drivers?tab=downloads. The driver might be different for your ESP32. Keep in mind we need driver so that our computer inside Device manager will put the ESP32 device under PORTS(COM & LPT).

Now that ESP32 is under PORTS(COM & LPT) let's start interacting with the board. The first thing that I found is that you can hold -> BOOT -> press RST -> hold BOOT for couple of more seconds. This made that my ESP32 starts blinking. Don't know if this step is necceseery but I did it.

Then I followed this tutorial - https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32/get-started/index.html#manual-installation. Choose your platform.

The program setup might take a couple of minutes. There should open up cmd or PowerShell inside directory - C:\Espressif\frameworks\esp-idf-v5.4.1>. Navigate to directory - C:\Espressif\frameworks\esp-idf-v5.4.1\examples\get-started\hello_world> here are some sample projects that you can try out. Then run command - idf.py build. If you did not get any errors you can now run command - idf.py -p COM-yourCOM flash. Then run the command - idf.py -p COM5 monitor. You should see Hello world! appear inside the console.