Whether that's "better overall" or not depends on individual usage patterns. Personally, I don't really stray from the alphanumeric part of the keyboard often, and I can rebind esc, so the Touchbar's mostly a moot point for me. My strongest reason to dislike it is that it adds yet another set of potential points of failure for the machine without providing (for my purposes) much benefit.

I remember the time when everybody was getting one of these: https://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=pfu_keyboards,hh...

Apple tinkering with the function keys has allowed the development community to recongratulate themselves with IDE it seems.

Seems also that people confidently touch type debugger instruction, despite the key that you want being literally squeezed between 2 keys that will ruin you debugging session and make you lose the next 10 minutes.

I think the developer community at large is more prone to overreaction.

Note that I think people are going to be impacted. I think the touchbar is a downgrade for people that needs to use Windows either in the VM or Bootcamp. Some IDE are especially F-keys happy like Eclipse will be slightly worst of.

I still type on an old MBP with physical F-keys and they are actually awful for touch typing. They are smaller, evenly spaced (no grouped) and not aligned with the lower key rows. If you are serious about touch typing potentially workflow ruining key combination like debugger ones, you must use an external keyboard already.