Dear Carl,
once again, I am delighted that you yourself are using the community page for feedback from us, such as me, and I don’t want to miss out on this opportunity.
Personally, I don’t think the sidebar is necessary. I don’t like it when functions are duplicated and triplicated in an operating system, but I prefer it when there is a logical and uniform path for each function. In the case of Nothing OS, there are widgets that contain many functions that only involve checking information.
To launch apps quickly, there is the double press power button gesture or the pin function in the app drawer.
I see the programming of a side bar as wasted capacity and would rather invest the development capacity in system optimization or the implementation of new widgets or glyph functions.