I've been building hobby LED art projects with WLED (exclusively built on the ESP32 platform). It's been a blast. These little boards are so powerful and the open source community continues to amaze me.

My preferred controller platform is of the QuinLED line - comes with power distribution, voltage regulators, fat copper lines, configurable data-line resistors, and smart auxiliary hardware support all for an affordable $30-$50 per controller. (quinled.info)

<https://kno.wled.ge/> - WLED homepage and probably my favorite clever URL of all time.