The notch grants more usable vertical physical pixels than you'd have otherwise, with the only "downside" being a small unusable area in the center where the camera/mic/other sensors are placed.
I put "downside" in quotes because the alternative is just not having those vertical pixels at all, and having the screen end below the sensors.
The problem is, by granting more vertical space in such a way that requires additional application logic to avoid overlaps, you've taken a sacred abstraction (the rectangular screen) and shattered it.
Most applications do not handle this well, and I'm willing to bet that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.
I can see the allure. If you're a default macOS user with the menu bar not set to slide up when not in use, that space nicely fits. Problem still remains for fullscreen apps though.
And it's not even really a hardware problem. Apple could fix this in software. Just make using the unsafe region an opt-in for developers instead of the default. You want to paint in the unsafe region, call NSAllowUnsafeRegionResolution(). Boom done. By default, when the menu bar isn't shown, expose a rectangle to the viewport.
I put "downside" in quotes because the alternative is just not having those vertical pixels at all, and having the screen end below the sensors.