I ran into an oddity with the latest NFC Deck that I built. When starting up, it would take an hour for home assistant to connect and for me to be able to get logs out of it over WiFi with the ESPHome addon. The ESP I used was no different from the first NFC Deck that I built, and the vast majority of the configuration was the same too.
There were however a few things that were different this time based on how the ESPHome web installer and home assistant adoption process went. The big one I found was the web_server was enabled on the new one. This lets you access a little web page to see everything onboard and interact with it. I guess it just couldn’t handle the number of components and sensors onboard the NFC Deck ( 9 buttons, 27 templates, 9 lights, NFC reader, piezo buzzer, rotary), because removing that from the configuration and uploading a new firmware fixed it.
TlDr: If you have an ESP that takes FOREVER for home assistant to connect to, check to see if the web_server component is included in the build, if it is, try removing it and see if that fixes everything.