To be clear: what I've described is not a "fix" – it's an unalloyed improvement. I use this configuration uniformly across all keyboards: control and ESC on the home row FTW.

Also, take your angry generalizations about TouchBar users elsewhere. Aside from the ESC key loss I'm fine with the TouchBar, and know quite a few competent touch-typist developers who really like it as well. It is very divisive, but please leave off characterizing others' preferences according to your own frustration.

And I really do understand your frustration with the keyboards. They're just not great, and the reliability problems are a disaster. The only silver lining is that there's pretty reliable info that Apple is switching back to scissor mechanism keyboards for its laptops this year. Doesn't help the rest of us stuck with the "bad" years keyboards, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯