The issue is that its a comparison about apples to peaches. The RPI2040 is JUST the chip whereas the ESP32 come with tons of peripherals for your liking.
From Wifi/Bluetooth Antenna, LI Battery Controller, Ethernet whatever, Display or Camera Connector - You choose.
And then we have a multitude of even CPU choices and when running on a coin cell it makes a difference powering a second, unnecessary core or even wifi.
And with the C6 variants, Espressif even switches ISA again, from 8266, to ESP32 to a RISC-V based ISA.
So you are comparing the first of its kind SOC with a decade old Family of SBCs.
The issue is that the author makes a lot of use of pipes e.g. "|" which has a single page as its buffer and immediatly makes the task pretty much CPU bound. (Because of context switches etc). This is why people use "dd" - It does not need pages/pipes/context switches to stream data in large chunks from a device to a file or vice versa.
From Wifi/Bluetooth Antenna, LI Battery Controller, Ethernet whatever, Display or Camera Connector - You choose.
And then we have a multitude of even CPU choices and when running on a coin cell it makes a difference powering a second, unnecessary core or even wifi.
And with the C6 variants, Espressif even switches ISA again, from 8266, to ESP32 to a RISC-V based ISA.
So you are comparing the first of its kind SOC with a decade old Family of SBCs.