True, but it has been essential for a long time before the notch for those of us with a non-trivial amount of software. The menu bar is a popular spot and so many apps want to put an icon there.

man I add a few icons using istatmenus and don't even come close to the notch... what kind of icons do you have?

Mine are (R to L): system date and time - system control center - iStat Network up/down and histogram - iStat Battery - Dropbox

that fills about 40% of the way to the notch... 50% when I'm unplugged and the battery is showing time remaining

istat puts a bunch of graphs in the bar (CPU, memory, disk, network)

Yeah I use two of them