While I had contributed the ESP32 Neopixel driver to Adafruit

• While I had contributed the ESP32 Neopixel driver to Adafruit
• The Adafruit driver prevents IR from working since it disables interrupts
• FastLED is a much better driver for lots of pixel types and CPUs
• On 32bit chips, it re-enables interrupts between each pixel update
• This allows the IR interrupt handler to run in between 2 pixels
• If the ISR takes too long, FastLED is smart enough to cancel updating the rest of the strip and avoid corrupted display due to mistmatched timings http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2017-04-03_Arduino-328P-Uno-Teensy3_1-ESP8266-ESP32-IR-and-Neopixels.html

Doing Neopixels with constant updates and IR is not simple