While I'm willing to give credence to your theory, at best I think the touchbar is "meh" and at worst is a net negative to the experience. We've seen Apple backpedal a bit already by introducing a physical escape key.
On a personal note, my issue with the touchbar is that it doesn't really bring more to the table, and sometimes makes the experience worse. The Volume and brightness sliders come to mind immediately, instead of pressing a key on the keyboard, one has to touch the icon, then use the slider. Is it a major hurdle? No, but it doesn't add anything special. The best use I've found for it is using BetterTouchTool to make buttons to run Photoshop scripts, and even then the benefit is dubious over custom keyboard shortcuts.
And, let's not forget the occasional glitchiness. There've been times that the touchbar becomes unresponsive for a second or hiccups. Minor issues yes, but it's a net negative when there's no real benefit to having the darned thing in the first place.
And if you use an external keyboard at all, the whole thing becomes moot. Any muscle memory you have won't transfer over to the built in keyboard, or vice versa for the external one.
Maybe it's not widely hated, but I don't think there's anyone singing its praises anymore.
