alt Hacker NewsiStat menus (or the new open source "Stats") is a brilliant use of the menu bar, but it can take a lot of space!
Then couple ordinary services that add menu bar icons that you don't even ask for (DropBox, Docker, Adobe, etc.) and you can overflow onto the notch quite quickly.
I use iStat Menus and I recently got one of those menu-bar expander utilities. It’s so good I forgot its name already!
Now I just click on the chevron whenever I need to access Tailscale or Postgres or CloudFlare or Creative Cloud Dropbox or Google Dropbox or ……
Really solved the problem for me.