Nodemcu does not connect to phone wifi
From my experience the esp8266's wifi is a little bit buggy sometimes. I'm not sure if it has something to do with the esp auto-connecting to known networks, but I managed to work-around this issue by explicitly WiFi.disconnect()ing from any potential network right before calling WiFi.begin().

Another thing that I noticed several times is that the esp can be easily disturbed when connected to a breadboard, in special when wifi is in use (in this case the esp might even crash). There must be some bad interferences, I guess.