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I haven't dug into how you adjust the keyboard light yet either but yeah that was one of the first things I noticed with the reworked function key shortcuts from my 2015.

Edit: quickly found it by playing around and clicking the little double swipey bars between the magnifying glass and the Siri icon in the top right and there's a drop down option to adjust brightness, along with other things.
 
they got rid of the hardware shortcuts
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