I love this. Yes, those were horrible. The current Apple TV Remotes with the touch surface area is practically unusable by any but a twitch video gamer. Every time I watch my mom try to select anything I'd see her try to push the button and the touch surface would end up moving the selection. Eventually i bought her a 3rd party remote so she could stop being constantly frustrated.
It's really hard to believe apple actually tested this with real people.
If they would've just added the bar above the normal F-keys, everyone would've either embraced or ignored it. But taking away function keys was just too much for pretty much everyone - especially ESC (which they rectified in a later iteration).
But it was expensive. So it was only all the more expensive models, the ones that professionals and programmers used. And a lot of them hated it.
I don’t mind it that much personally. My work laptop has one and it can be nice on occasion. But when I switch to a laptop that doesn’t have one I don’t miss it at all.
(I have the hardware escape key. I think without that it would truly drive me nuts.)
For a while there it was like someone inside Apple wanted to chase developers away from their laptops.
I had a MBP, 2019 I believe. It was riddled with problems. True Tone color was wrong. Flickering on the display. The weird internet connectivity which often required some hacky restart. The touch bar was a terrible idea; this was a time when other laptops had high quality touch screens that were actually useful. The touch bar was a half-hearted implementation with a fraction of the benefits of a touch screen, but taking up a whole row on the keyboard.
But then they make the best processors and have the most power in a compact space, so as OP said, there's really no other option. I gave it another chance and they've fixed all the problems from the 2019 model.