The last time esptool.py supplied with PlatformIO recieved an update was over a year ago. Since then, there have been a lot of improvements, especially in regards to reliability of starting and maintaining connections.

I've been using the ESP32-S3 in some recent projects, and I've found that the chips native USB-Serial port works great for flashing and debugging, but works way more reliably with those newer releases.

Note: There has been some slight changes in dependencies, so it's not a simple git pull and done. But I was able to get flashing with only a single pip install IntelHex on the platformio pyenv.