A few hours ago, I saw an announcement of a new Adafruit product #5961, connecting Stemma QT/Qwiic connector to a breadboard.
I quickly realized that by having two of these, with headers soldered on (consider using right-angle headers for this), one can use "Flat Flexible Cable" ("FFC") AF04-5-ND from Digi-Key, along with Digi-Key crimp-on connectors 609-3512-ND, to connect something like a sensor on one side of a door/operating window/etc to a microcontroller on the other side.
The FFC is MUCH thinner than a normal Stemma QT/Qwiic cable, or indeed any sort of "ribbon" cable I've seen in my nearly 60 years of "doing" electronics, so the FFC is MUCH better at getting through doors/windows/etc. You may be familiar with FFC in a custom form (often called Flexible Printed Circuits) for connectors on various small displays.
I should mention that those "crimp on" connectors can be a tad bit ornery to get on. I usually find that a largish pair of "pump" pliers to do the ''crimping' and another pair of pliers to "convince" the side pieces to close will do the trick. Also, if you have a sensor exposed to the weather, you might want to consider adding some conformal coating (though the device and connections before applying the coating, and if your sensor includes humidity and/or barometric pressure, be sure to protect the "sensor hole" from the coating.
One instance of this that I've used the FFC for is a sensor outside a window while keeping an ESP-8266 safely on the window sill. I also have sensors inside both the fridge section and freezer section of my side-by-side with an ESP-8266 on top of the unit. (A fridge would make a pretty good Faraday Cage, so WiFi inside the fridge probably wouldn't work.)