Hah, that reminds me! My first work issued Mac didn't have the ESC key, just the touch bar. IIRC a program hung in fullscreen, freezing both the app and the touch bar. So I had to reboot to get out of it because the esc key didn't work.
Its interesting the touch bar was also hung up, as from what I recall the touchbar was actually driven by a separate processor (the T1/T2 chip) and had its own version of watchOS running. I would have thought it would have continued working, just unable to continue syncing with the rest of the Mac.
Yeah, it locked up on me every couple months or so. Very glad to see it gone (as the primary ESC + F-row input).
I also would not mind it in addition to regular keys, there are some great interactions in there. But it's an extremely poor keyboard-emulator. Splitting off the escape key made a huge improvement, but it's nowhere near enough.
Yeah Apple has had a few missteps like this over the last 5 to 10 years. They assert themselves with that Steve Jobs mentality of “we know what’s best for you,” but he got it right more often than the current iteration. The touch bar was definitely not properly assessed by users before shipping.
Those 2019-2020 models are absolute trash. I don’t know what happened. My 2016 MBPro smokes the few we have bouncing around at work. They started falling apart like year 3, and my MBPro was the first iteration of their newer builds with the butterfly keyboard/non-optional Touch Bar!
You should have been able to Cmd-Tab to a different app; if that wasn't working, something more serious was going on. Also, if you have Spaces enabled, you can three-finger swipe, since a full screen app gets its own Space.
