If you don't require low power, critical safety or forwards compatibility, then you might be overthinking it. I would say to tie it to ground as like you said, the pin physically cannot go output. I never considered the possibility that it could couple noise and draw more power, so I'm also interest...

Not what you are asking about, but you know you can increase the serial speed during flashing? It's a menuconfig option, or you can do it on the commandline with e.g. 'idf.py flash -b 1000000' or 'make ESP_BAUD=1000000 flash'. Thanks, this helped a lot and cut down a 1MB flash that took 60 seconds,...

I had tried to set the flasher via menuconfig to use QIO as I figured this would be faster, but I am also using the vscode plugin and I can see in the console output that it is still using DIO.

I will give your option a go too, thank you.

For anyone not understanding, this may help

Hi all, this is a little tricky to explain, but my motivation is: When I add wifi components to my project, the code size grows quite large and flashing takes a minute, instead of seconds. However the wifi addition is now completed, I will only need exactly what I have, so to me it seems reasonable ...