I got my own ESP32 board printed and assembled one myself. Everything is tested to work as of yesterday until the serial stops working. The board would boot into firmware flash mode all the time. The only thing I changed was that I added 30cm of jumper wires between my board and the FTDI adapter. I thought that at 115200 the jumper wires shouldn't be an issue. I guess I was wrong. Maybe too much resistance or somehow the magical double NPN transistor circuit didn't work its magic (heaven forbids their magic smoke from escaping the black epoxy).
I wonder if this is typical at 115200 baud rate.
Another thing was that the serial adapter (FT232R) had a 10k resistor inline with its TX (ESP32 RX) and it just didn't work. Nothing was getting into ESP32. I shorted the resistor in order to make it work. The adapter worked so well with all my arduino board designs that I never thought 115200 was an issue with this adapter and a short jumper wire.