I just had another look at the Water Leak Detector project, which uses an M5StickC and esphome. The YAML only describes sensing the battery level, but the code is their custom component for AXP192 does have a control for display brightness.
I only looked at the code just now. I didn’t try any experiments, but there’s a reasonable chance it works (at least in native C++ code … how to interface to esphome? dunno).