The fact that people that frequent HN complain about something does not make it an obviously bad idea. Most of the developer complaints about the touchbar are about losing the hardware function and escape keys (which depending on how you use your laptop can be a bad trade off). Outside of that audience (and for those that code most of the time using an external keyboard) it’s actually pretty great. I say this based both on my experience for the past 18 months as well as from observing others (primarily non-developers).