reducing deep sleep current of development boards

[obod0002]

while development boards are great for, well, developments, they tend to drain batteries more than bare ESP32's.
However bare ESP32's are abit tricky when it comes to soldering PCB's or simply accessing pins.

Would it be possible to take the advantages of both worlds using (easy flashing and easy accessing pins as well as low deep sleep current) also for dev boards? Maybe just a little trick or modification is needed? Maybe a component needs to be de-soldered or one trace cut?

I'm using LiFePO4 resp. 2 AA batteries so I don't need USB / 5V input later.