Does esphome have such a feature?
One of my test devices apparently won’t even bring up the fallback captive_portal AP now. I opened it up and the soldering pins are non-obvious 
I’d love that, too. I have a few devices that sometimes don’t connect to the api or don’t even connect to WiFi after a power cycle or OTA update. Repeated power cycles may eventually bring success.
If you haven’t, you might want to try just waiting–sometimes a very long time–and your device may eventually connect. After leaving a device powered on and walking away in frustration, I came back later to find that it had connected miraculously after an hour or so.
It’s early days on one test I’m doing, but I think that I may have solved the issue with one particularly troublesome device by setting a static IP on the router rather than at first on the ESP itself. I don’t know if the issue is one with my Google Wifi set-up or with the ESP itself. I was almost ready to give up, but so far after about a week, connections with this ESP are almost immediate.