You have an ESP8266 board like the Wemos D1, a Li-Ion battery, you want to build a small battery-powered sensor that wakes up every few minutes to do something, and you don’t want to delve into ...

Looking back to the actual WEMOS Mini D1 board, it has a properly secured USB port, and nice pads around all relevant vias. There seems to be an effort to revise and improve the board as time goes on.