I don't think they do disagree with me. I'm not suggesting that the physical escape key isn't a better option for people. I'm just responding to the person that said the Touch Bar was broken because it didn't include a physical escape key. It's not broken. It works exactly the same, functionally, as the physical key so there's nothing you can do with the physical key that you can't do with the virtual key on the Touch Bar. The physical key is just better because it's tactile and now usable for all the devs that rely on it.

I think Apple putting the physical escape key back indicates that they agree it was broken, relative to a virtual escape key.

The only advantage to a virtual Esc is getting that piece of real estate if you don't happen to want one, and as has been pointed out elsewhere, Escape is an important affordance in macOS-land, even if you aren't a Vim user.

The important report here is a process freezing both the UI and the touch bar, and therefore option-command-escape being unavailable to bring up force quit. That's obviously bad, and I would call it broken. Edge case but an important one!

This is just a quibble about whether it's worse enough to deserve the moniker "broken", though. I'm not personally attached to that, just want to point out that it does in fact break an important action in the core vocabulary.

>I think Apple putting the physical escape key back indicates that they agree it was broken, relative to a virtual escape key.

No it doesn't. All that it indicates is that there was a preference for it by part of their demographic. Again, developers are in the minority here. Most Macbook users don't care and it was an easy concession to make from Apple.