It seems like it would be better in the short term (don't have to learn the bindings), but worse in the long term if it's something you do often (no way to find the keys' edges without looking every time you press the key, with the occasional glance down again to correct for drift).

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.