Exactly! And you write like one of our small ones - but with a little more punctuation 
Not at all!
You can just check the release notes yourself. To me it looks like the last vulnerability in esphome was CVE-2021-41104 fixed in the 2021.9.0 release. If you are feature complete on your node this probably should be the oldest version to run. 
I don’t use tasmota anymore since four or five (?) years - but it was a common problem back then. setOption xyz was supposed to fix it I think… but yea, just was never stable to do serious things with it back in the time 
Using espressif devices since long time and used a lot of projects along the road… espeasy, espurna, tasmota… all were nice but none of them was “production ready”. Everything changed with esphome 
Since then it is possible to have reproducible success and no problems with amnesia (lost settings etc.). 
Also the native api with encryption is something I would never exchange against mqtt 
Last but not least local automation that are actually easy to do and are not some cryptic assembler script style allows functions like over power shut off or timed shut off (pump runs for maximum x) to be implemented easily on a esphome node 
Some people are happy running Tasmota 5 on a wall switch - why not? 