The problem Tahoe created, and how to fix it
Since macOS 26 (Tahoe), when the menu bar gets too crowded, the system hides icons on its own, without warning either the user or the apps involved. They vanish behind the notch or get pushed off screen, the order sometimes gets rewritten, and worse: the system flag that's supposed to say whether an icon is visible (isVisible) reports "yes" even when it's actually invisible. It's a real product bug, not something you imagined.
Install SeventyBar. It adds a single icon to your menu bar. One click opens a pocket right below it, with all your other icons tidied up, clickable exactly as if they were still in place. Icons macOS hid on its own show up there too, labeled "hidden by macOS", and stay fully clickable from the pocket.
Download the free SeventyBar trial (7 days, macOS 13+).
System Settings > Menu Bar does offer a per-app toggle, but it's binary: an icon is either always shown or never shown. No native setting does "hidden but one click away", and none tells you when an icon has been pushed out of view by the system. That's exactly the gap SeventyBar fills.
SeventyBar reads other apps' menu bar items through Accessibility, the same permission many Mac utilities already ask for. No screenshots, no blind synthetic clicks: every icon in the pocket is activated directly through its own system action, which keeps it clickable even when it's genuinely off screen.
Icons stuck near the notch are exactly the kind macOS pushes out of view first. They end up in SeventyBar's pocket, one click away, with nothing to reorganize.
Get SeventyBar: 7-day trial, then a lifetime license.