Developing on an ESP8266 is completely different than a RasPi Zero. If you want a challenge, and want to write code that can run in 80KB of RAM and have the code and all of its dependencies fit in 4MB of flash, then that’s part of the reason why microcontrollers are popular (also because a lot of them are easy to get going with).
I understand your misconceptions about this working. It really just depends on if it appears to be vulnerable enough to scanners, and whether people actually bother to take interest. I guess you could say that my "project" is more of and experiment in how hackers go about finding vulnerable devices. Who knows, maybe hackers don't take interest in vulnerable telnet services anymore (they probably don't), but thats okay, this was fun while it lasted. I'll leave the memes on the readme.
Hey- if you are the author, I want to say I support what you are doing. We need more projects like this. But when I read the source, looks pretty lean to me in terms of follow on functionality. Would love to help you expand on this.