I personally like them for resolving merge conflicts by hand. It really helps just clicking on a section in blueish to instantly jump to a conflict in large-ish files.

This can be done by colorbands on the scrollbar though

In VSCode you can make it narrow and replace the scrollbar with it, it looks cool :-p

just tried and i think i like it.

I agree, it's a waste of screen estate and focus estate, I can't see the benefit of a minimap. I usually use imenu in Emacs so any definition is 0.1s away with a keypress

I don't tend to find horizontal screen estate to be all that useful, unless A). You have your editor massively zoomed in or B). your lines are (subjectively) too long

I dont find them massively useful, but its nice to have

I’ve seen people using banner style comments visible in the minimap. That is almost useful. But not really.