Potentially you're trying to reconfigure GPIO18/19. Those are the pins the USB connection runs on, so if you reconfigure those, you can't put the chip into download mode via USB anymore.

Not sure I understand. I'm not doing anything with GPIO18/19. At least not explicitly in my code.

Your board’s chip has 4MB flash.

The app was built with a 2MB flash setting (--flash_size 2MB in your esptool line).

That means the image header doesn’t match the actual hardware, and the IDF chooses the smaller size (2MB), which can cause mis-addressing and watchdog resets.
Reconfigure the ...

Nevermind, I didn't use the set-target command:

at line 147: I went into the menuconfig and disabled the watchdog timer

I'm try to flash the example code for protocols/sockets/tcp_client and it keeps rebooting with the following from the monitor:
[803/804] Generating binary image from built executable
esptool.py v4.10.dev2
Creating esp32c3 image...
Merged 1 ELF section
Successfully created esp32c3 image.
Generated ...

Here's what I did to get it to work:
and run ". ./export.sh" in ESP8266_RTOS_SDK directory

It seems you have to 1) hold the boot button down, 2) press and release the reset button, 3) release the boot button.

Funny thing is, I never had to do that before. Something must have changed. I have several others I could try.

while installing the sdk, I ran python -m pip install --user -r requirements.txt and got some error (I forget what it is now) so I found this link: https://esp32.com/viewtopic.php?t=12481 and followed the instructions on the 2nd post by ESP_igrr:
3. Delete C:\\ESP\\.espressif\\python_env\\idf3.3 ...

Actually, it's supposed to be /dev/ttyACM0

I've popped 3 just today so far. Here's my flash script:
idf.py -p /dev/ttyAMC0 flash
I'm trying to use the espnow example: esp-idf/examples/wifi/espnow_basic_example-master/espnow_basic_slave
All I know is that after I flash it, I try to run the monitor program or get onto the serial port and ...