Connection of ESP32/ ESP8266 not recognized using MacBook Pro
I had the same problem. There are a series of questions you need to go through that might change your solution.

1st of all, which board are you using? There are several versions of the ESP chip, which are well documented in the arduino-esp8266 docs

2nd of all, I've read some forums that say that the USB cable has to be good quality, otherwise the board will not successfully connect. I don't know too much about good usb cables, but I do know that the shorter the better as far as signal loss is concerned

Lastly, which driver did you install? I installed the SiliconLabs driver. It's important to note that in their readme (something I neglected to read until after 5 hours of troubleshooting) it explains that Mac blocks the driver from running until you give it permission. So, when you install the driver, the installer will need to get permission to run, but ALSO the driver itself will need to get permission to run. So, once you install the driver, go to System Preferences -> Security and allow the driver to run.



I found out that you can verify that the driver was installed, you can run kextstat in the command line to list out all of the "kernel extensions," including the driver, that are installed on your mac.

These steps should help you get your board to show up in /dev/tty.* and also in the ports menu in your Arduino IDE. Or at the very least, these steps should help you debug at which step of the setup process something went wrong.

Once you see your board in the ports menu, don't forget that in order to upload code, you need to set the board to flash mode (I forget to do that a lot).