I’m curious, what do you use F-keys for? I’ve moved to a mech keyboard with no F-keys, as I've never had much use for them. I do have a few choice custom shortcuts, using Command-Option-based shortcuts.
Coding mostly. I know by heart most of IntelliJ shortcuts. Things like find usages, type safe move and copy of code, rename of entities, etc. are F-key bound by default. I don’t customize because customization of defaults makes it harder to work on other people’s computers.
With the pandemic is kind of a non issue, but at the office it’s quite common.
My ideal setup would be to make the trackpad a tad smaller, add the physical function keys again and the touch bar above.
I don't think it was a good tradeoff for many use cases.