The 500mW are definitely too high. It is interesting, so far I was going with Makerfab’s ESP32 DW1000 based modules. In my use case (indoor navigation wo GPS), I really saw a difference when I switch to the Pro variant, which apparently has an inbuilt PA. It would be nice to have an off the shelf variant with PA, like NiceRF does, which safes me some integration effort.
Anyway thanks for confirming Fhilb.