1) First generation made ESC button a touch button. Aside from ergonomics (or lack of them), at least for me, on a psychological level "abort" button needs to be something you can smash. Also, macOS already had the worst input handling under load, making it virtual button made it worse.

2) While "happy path" on macOS pretty much never requires you to use Fkeys, but my workflow does. Blindly using touch buttons is harder than real buttons.

3) I'm not huge media keys users, but I bet #2 applies here as well.

I liked the touchbar in every other sense. If it was just an addition to an existing keyboard, people wouldn't have hate it[];

[]: At that time it was hard to not be frustrated using mac (butterfly keyboard etc), so touchbar might have gotten more hate than it deserved because of overall frustration.