During the weekend I started working on this idea. The main pain point is scarce documentation on eInk driver IT8951. There are some libs (from m5 themselves, and waveshare), but looks like most of them share same shitty base.
My feeling is that somebody just made something that works, and there are many ways how it could be improved. I'm thinking about reaching out to manufacturer to get more info, because driver has memory, and I would like to use it to not waste memory in esp32. And overall docs can help tune the panel better/faster. Currently text does not look sharp but I didn't spend enough time playing with it. I will not focus on that right now, I'll try to implement whole thing first.
Currently, I've done qoi decoding of statically linked image, and it8951 driver. I'm not happy with result yet, but let's see. Next step is to fetch images from server.