What Apple did with the notch was leave the camera in the bezel, but they pushed the screen up into the bezel and put the menu there. That freed up space below that area for app content. The area below the notch on the MBPs is the same size as the previous full screen. We just gained some extra space where the bezel was.
Menus intelligently avoid the notch and pop over to the right, if needed. This is mostly just the Window and Help menus, which are much less used.
The only problem with the notch is a little less space for menu bar icons. The space they can exist in is less when they have to share the space with the notch. This was not a new problem with the notch, it just made is a little more common. Lots of us were using third-party apps to divert extra menu bar icons to sub panels even before the notch came on the scene. I do wish that Apple would bring out a first party solution to manage those icons and give us a place to see them when there are too many to show.
Overall the notch and moving the menu into the bezel was a clever bit of design that allow the screen to get bigger without requiring the case to get bigger. It was a twofer.
It probably would have gone down better if Apple had included a setting to make the menu bar black so people bugged by having a visual element there could ignore it. There are third-party tools that do that but some people don’t want to use them. I’ve tried them but in the end don’t bother and turn them off.
