ESP-NOW Remote control

Hi everyone,

it's been a few years since I have tinkered with VESCs and now I am getting back into it.
My goal is to drive 5 inch gauge model railways with these ESCs and I need a suitable remote for my application.
Since 2019 the VESC Express is born, which is a great addition to the ecosystem!
Because I want to control additional things like lights and horns with the VESC Express, I would connect power transistors to it's GPIOs.
Now to my question: What is the best way to implement a remote control for this application? I need quiet a bit of range, so Bluetooth won't do it!
My idea was to use Lisp scripts on the Express and ESP-NOW to receive information from a potential ESP32-S3 remote.
The data would include set speed or power/current information as well as the state of the GPIOs to control my components.
Also, the Express would send back information like the actual speed, voltage of the lead acid batteries etc.
Is this doable and is ESP-NOW fast enough for this application? Maybe 10Hz update rate of the data and telemetry?
Another idea was to use the UART of the Express and make the wireless connection with Xbee modules.
As for my background: I am a power electronics engineer and I have respectable experience in C programming, but I want to build and drive trains and not develop software for months.
Would maybe Arduino or Micropython do the job and are there any examples I could start with?
Of course I would share my results so everyone can benefit from it!

Have a nice day, blb