The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff. The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness or weird issues... because they have 2 dozen utilities running in the background that they don't consider, which are all looking for CPU time or trying to change the default behavior of the OS in conflicting ways.

My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS. I had a similar desire with the system tray on Windows (though it was more difficult on Windows due to some hardware requiring it).

Work is the only place I have an issue, because they install a bunch of security agents that all want a spot in the menubar, even though they never need me to interact with them or know what they're doing. Those agents sitting up in the menubar tend to be the reason my system has slow downs or issues. Though the slowdowns have gone away since moving to M1. On Intel my fan used to run all the time. Now I'm just left with the weird issues they cause.

Ah, got it, I’m holding it wrong.

> My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS.

My goal is to use the apps I want to use, and if they are exclusively menu bar apps, what can I do about that?

> The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness

The cause for system slowness on my mac are too many browser tabs eating 500 MB memory each, not a few 10 MB native Swift apps.

I'm not even talking about app icons.

I'm talking about the file manager missing features.

Wifi issues going back years and years.

Default mice settings that make me want to throw the thing out a window. Seriously, who moves their cursor that slow?

The worst window manager I've ever used.

I could go on, but it's genuinely pointless. People love their macs like people love their sports teams. No matter what, some people will always love the maple leafs.

iStat menus (or the new open source "Stats") is a brilliant use of the menu bar, but it can take a lot of space!

Then couple ordinary services that add menu bar icons that you don't even ask for (DropBox, Docker, Adobe, etc.) and you can overflow onto the notch quite quickly.