I hadn't done much more than play with it in the store before a bit before buying my M1.I’m personally glad to see it go. I really only used it for volume and brightness because I had to, but these functions work great with buttons. I get what they were trying to do with it but it needed developers on board and they only had a few that really put effort in. And even then, I never felt incentivized (not enough benefit) to go through the cognitive dissonance to change how I did things to use it. I never felt it helped with my photographic workflow and as far as my developer-side, I was grumpy without my escape key before they rectified that.
To me, it's something with a lot of potential but also some serious flaws.
The biggest is the complete lack of any tactile feedback, or really of any features on the bar other than it just being a smooth piece of glass(or whatever it is). I've gotten better about it, but it's still not infrequent that I brush the touchbar and the computer does something I don't intend for it to do. A common one is typing a post like this and inadvertently touching the back or refresh button-fortunately Xenforo saves your work, but not all pages do.
Some programs did make some use of it that was handy. When I was teaching daily over Zoom, I would often find it difficult to monitor the chat box. Zoom puts notifications for it in the touchbar so it's a bit of extra screen area.
Rarely, though, do I do much more than adjust my volume or screen brightness. I did finally learn the handy trick of just pressing the volume button and sliding without lifting your finger to go up or down, so volume is handy, but otherwise it has to be expanded to do other(less frequently used) functions.
Fundamentally, though, I've spent who knows how long using a computer without needing to look at the keyboard, and all of a sudden Apple decides to throw something into the mix that requires you to look down from the screen at the keyboard.
Back in the early days of the Macintosh Operating System, there were Human Interface Guidelines that not only did Apple follow but also expected developers to follow. Even if the touchbar had existed in the 1980s, it would have run counter to the fundamental computer interaction experience Macs were meant to provide. Of course Apple kind of forgot some of those with OS X, although a lot of things did creep back in over the years. Then, something like the touchbar comes along that is a step backwards...
