It appears they weren't thinking.
The Touch Bar is a huge mystery to me and a colossal nuisance, who wants to look down at their fingers to type? Did we not spend our earliest computing years mastering touch typing specifically for the efficiency of NOT having to look down at your hands when typing? Growing up, our computer lab teacher would place a box over your hands to force you to memorize the key locations to drive home the point, and once memorization occurred it really clicked and WPM and general computing efficiency skyrocketed for everyone. So then comes the Touch Bar to solve no problem but instead introduce new problems, where your hands and fingers literally block the Touch Bar visibility from any normal usage viewing angle, meaning you have to move your hands away from the keyboard, then awkwardly poke around imprecisely with a single floating finger on a little tiny screen to hit "escape" or the "X" button to find the escape key or the brightness and audio output adjustments and other function keys. Did nobody at Apple test it out? Or even think it through? Where is their person to say "no" to what are clearly bad ideas?