But still no (physical) escape button.

I know regular consumers probably have no use for it, but as a die hard Vim user, it's kinda annoying.

I'm a die hard neovim user with a touch bar MacBook pro. I remapped caps lock to control and use control-] to escape in nvim. I'm used to it and it works just fine for me.

Other people like to map caps lock to escape, which makes it even easier. I have even heard of people doing this that have a physical escape key on their keyboards.

I’ve been doing the caps->esc remap for a lot longer than I’ve had a touchbar Mac. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to reach all the way to esc - constantly - day in and day out. My pinky and wrist would hate me.

You can have the best of both worlds - tap capslock for escape, hold for ctrl.

I currently use karabiner-elements to get this functionality, it's pretty good.

Turn you caps locks key into the Escape key. Using a TouchBar keyboard or otherwise, it is a better way to get around.

I've gotten used to the non physical escape button. Took me a while, but I got there in the end.

Ctrl-[

And turn Caps Lock into Ctrl