So there is an open issue on the project repo. Some person seemed to have made it work with an ESP32 by reverse engineering the protocol from analysing the signals from a working controller (I believe I read somewhere it was the HD-D16), see this comment. Unfortunately the video explaining everything is in Russian so not sure what exact information was provided. It does look pretty detailed to an uninformed person like me, though. There is some example C code for ESP32 linked in the video description and there is this repo which is an Arduino port of that example code with some more info.
Most others that tried reproducing it on other hardware seemed to still have issues such as flickering with it and so far there was no official support added for that chipset to the hzeller project. I don’t think anybody found any official documentation on the protocol of this chipset either.
So I guess ESP32 should be doable, but not sure if that is something the SmartMatrix library could support. Hope this was helpful