When a board that doesn't have any application flashed yet, there is nothing that will disable the watchdogs, therefore the stub has to correctly disable the watchdogs before flashing. These fixes should help when uploading large binaries, which currently may fail due to a watchdog timeout.
esptool.py v4.6.1 includes fixes for watchdogs:
When a board that doesn't have any application flashed yet, there is nothing that will disable the watchdogs, therefore the stub has to correctly disable the watchdogs before flashing. These fixes should help when uploading large binaries, which currently may fail due to a watchdog timeout.