Is this just someone reposting espressif's esp-drone (https://github.com/espressif/esp-drone) and passing it off as their own (and DigiKey posting it on their site)? They talk about making a custom PCB, but it looks pretty much the same.
The repository linked from the article (https://github.com/Circuit-Digest/ESP-Drone) has some issues claiming there's malware in it, and the commit history looks a little suspicious, but I could be wrong.
Since those who filed the issue did not even stated which file is affected this is pure speculation but the virus issue really look like a false positive. The pre-built firmware checked into a repo could easily trigger an anti-virus.
The repo is mostly made of plain text files, the zip and the bin don't look required for anything so if your feeling paranoid delete them before building!
The repository linked from the article (https://github.com/Circuit-Digest/ESP-Drone) has some issues claiming there's malware in it, and the commit history looks a little suspicious, but I could be wrong.