While looking through the documentation and code for ESPHome I found no indication that any GPIO expander component uses the interrupt pin most expanders have. Although some components support setting an interrupt trigger per pin.
I’m still not 100% familiar with ESPHome’s code structure, so I am not sure if I am missing something, but if this is correct it would be quite inefficient and noisy.
If others agree I could try to implement interrupt based polling. I think it wouldn’t even be that hard. The simplest solution would be to just modify the loop() method to only read pin states if the interrupt pin is active. And you would have to set all pins to interrupt on both edges.