Essential Studio vs Ionic: Which is best for you?

Outstanding breadth of high-quality components, excellent Blazor support (Scheduler, Dialogs, Data controls), fast and reliable performance, clear docs with runnable examples, responsive support, frequent updates, and easy theming.

I cannot replace Syncfusion's internal styling entirely with DaisyUI classes because you don't have direct access to the component's internal HTML tags

There are not many downsides but working with the shadow-DOM to customize components would probably be one. If you can avoid having too many customizations then this is the perfect product.

Also I've started using the new streamlined wizards to setup new projects and it seems the've solved a lot of the issues and complexity.