I love macOS in a lot of ways, but the menu bar feels like a constant source of low-level frustration, especially on notched Macs.
The notch just makes everything worse. There is no clear or predictable way to know how many menu bar items will fit horizontally, which app will push which icon into oblivion, or what disappears when something new decides to show up. Launch one app, and suddenly half your icons are gone. Close another, and they randomly come back in a different order.
What really drives me nuts is how some apps silently add menu bar items (Tahoe at least helps in turning them off) without notifying. Some show up at startup, some appear after a fresh install, some only when you launch the app once, and others come back even after you think you disabled them.
Third-party tools try to help, but they feel fragile. Ice is an example. Not sure it is actively maintained, bugs keep popping up, and needing screen recording permissions just to manage menu bar icons feels wrong.
Then I look at Windows. The system tray is not perfect, but at least it is understandable. Icons overflow into a dedicated area. Things do not randomly disappear behind a notch-shaped black hole. The Windows system tray isn’t universally better (it has its own quirks), but my point stands that the operating system handles this specific problem more transparently.
macOS offers so much customisation elsewhere, yet the menu bar feels stuck in the past. This is one place where Apple really needs an iPhone-like approach. A clear overflow, predictable behaviour, and a first-party solution for a dedicated area that just works. Until then, the menu bar remains cursed.