Of course if it's just going to show the default set of buttons all the time, that's a feature also achievable with... actual keys.

Default keys won’t prevent the touchbar from freezing or bugging out, which has occurred multiple times for me. It’s odd to make such important keys software based and prone to non mechanical failure.

I wonder what fails more often, the touchbar or mechanical keys. In any case, though, the touchbar is the anti-feature nobody asked for.

I've had a TouchBar MacBook Pro for about 2 years now. The TouchBar has frozen or crashed on me multiple times. Apart from the terrible butterfly keyboard on this same computer which also tends to fail, literallyt never in 35-ish years using computers I had a mechanical key failing on me.

Thank you! I couldn't figure out how to do that.

If you set the default to function keys, you can also set the fn key to show the expanded control strip too.