Maybe. But personally I would not want to do it and rather prefer full local control and ownership. ESPHome does not only work with ESP based devices but also on many tuya devices that use beken and realtek chips. 
For my use case I got some sets of this cheap (~$8) 4-relay type boards which come with housing and supercharged them with espHome. In the past I used to build my own (sub $10) controllers… 
The obvious advantage of a esphome based solution is the spinkler/irrigation component running directly on the node making it a one-stop-shop to setup and more resilient (not depended of HA for example). Only caveat is the needed time source which can ether be sourced by adding a rtc or my probe via (s)ntp when a network connection is present 