I am glad you found the solution. Just wondering whats going on.Looks like your boards are of poor quality. I had similar issues with a ESP32-S3 fake module where the PCB antenna was of poor quality.
I remember there is a way to fix the antenna by soldering a short piece of wire to a specific point.
If you want to use the Serial object on the builtin USB use the build flag 'ARDUINO_USB_CDC_ON_BOOT=1`.
Search this forum, there are a lot of posts about this topic! ESP32-S3 native USB interface and Serial Monitor missing first messages - #10 by sivar2311