They shoved it down everyone’s throat, and most people hated it. They should never have done it. It’s an excellent idea for those who need it, as in the example I mentioned. My son takes remote music lessons and used a MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar for a year to control the sound, and that was excellent. Then, I replaced his Intel MacBook Pro with an M1 MacBook Air, and now we both see that the Touch Bar sound controls were so much more intuitive. He can still, of course, do the same controls with the trackpad, but it takes longer and is not as convenient. It was at that time that I realized that the Touch Bar had some useful applications in some use cases.
Apple is keeping the MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar alive, and in fact they have just updated the MacBook Pro with Touch Bat to M2. They are obviously not phasing out this particular model with the Touch Bar. If they were, they wouldn’t have updated it a few days ago.