I would strongly urge, if going with half-height arrow keys, to make the side arrows half height as well, rather than full height. This helps with both finding the key cluster and using it. Consider leaving a small gap to the left of the cluster as well, which in this case could conveniently be done by making the keys a bit narrower—they look unreasonably wide as it is. Ideally I’d also say shift them lower, breaking out of the rectangle and allowing taller arrows (even ⅔ or ¾ height would be a good improvement), but I can imagine that may fall afoul of manufacturing practicalities.

Another nice feature for keyboard design is small gaps between Esc and F1, F4 and F5, F8 and F9, and F12 and what’s to its right, as desktop keyboards have always done; this helps fingers to blindly find the right place. Not very many laptops do this; the main ones I’ve noticed doing it in my recent research is ASUS ROG laptops, which do seem to put more thought than most into these sorts of details. In the pictures shown here, the Escape and especially Delete keys look to be unnecessarily wide so that you could reduce their widths a bit to provide this space perhaps without shrinking anything else.

Yea, fun fact: I like my Acer Nitro 5. I'm an Apple fan through and through, but I also like to run Linux and Windows and haven't done that in a while, so I bought an Acer.

I'm using my Acer now more as a dev laptop and my Mac more as a free time laptop. What I'm noticing is that I'm enjoying the typing experience on the Nitro 5 more, in particular because it has decent arrows (and a numpad :) ).

The hjkl keys look full size to me.

ducks

I feel you. IMHO Lenovo still makes the best laptop keybaord layouts for coding, typing and gaming. Check out their Legion series.

I have noticed that most laptops under 14" have those 1/2 keys, but once you go to 15" the overall weight increases a lot. The only 14" laptop I've used with full arrow keys was the System76 Galago Pro Gen 3 (galp3).