With the touchbar I really missed having the fixed set of tactile keys for sound/media control, screen brightness.

I also found I was fat fingering the Touch Bar to much due to my clumsy typing and naturally resting hands on the function keys.

I ended up disabling the Touch Bar only keeping sound and brightness icons.

The biggest disadvantage to the Touch Bar was ergonomics, loosing frequently used tactile keys, the position, needing to look down to see what you are pressing and the ease of fat fingering keys by mistake.

The concept is good but the implementation didn’t work on a laptop. The stream deck looks to be a bit more ergonomic, you can position it somewhere convenient, the keys are on an angle so easier to see, I imagine the big tactile buttons also work well.

Disliking the Touch Bar I’d also highly likely by an Apple external touchbar with tactile keys if it was sized similarly to an external number pad I could tilt up on an angle.