My biggest need for managing the icons in the menu bar is to prevent them from getting lost behind the notch on my 14" MBP. I recently discovered this question on StackExchange on how to change the icon spacing and padding and that has kinda resolved the situation, but it doesn't look visually as good.
Perhaps the padding and spacing adjustment could also be brought to Ice?
I'm happy to see that alternatives to Bartender exist! I guess this is not the most straightforward thing to do, as there seem to be many apps for this, but most are no longer in development.
As an aside, there are options in macOS to move some icons like bluetooth and wifi to the control center away from the status bar, but for some reason they always seem to come back.