I had the exact same problem. It appeared after updating macOS Big Sur 11.6 to Monterey 12.2 I have a MacBook Pro 13" 2017 (4 usb) I was sure from the beginning that it was a software error. And I wasn't going to pay Apple for their mistakes. None of the advice on this and other forums helped me. Then I did the following: Booted in safe mode (via Shift) made a full copy to Flash drive Rebooted into recovery mode opened disk utility and wiped absolutely everything - all the partitions on the drive rebooted again booted into internet recovery installed macOS 10.13 High Sierra and the Touch Bar worked. Then I upgraded to macOS Monterey and the Touch Bar still worked. Then I restored all my data from the copy and rebooted a few times Touch Bar continued to work fine. But I decided not to stop there. I installed Boot Camp. Now everything was just fine. I'm zen. I decided that my time was more valuable. And I don't plan on fixing the bugs that Apple makes. I've been googling a lot to find a solution to this problem. And I'm surprised at how many people have been misled by Apple experts on forums and in service centers. All of these people have paid a lot of money for programmer mistakes and unqualified customer service. They don't even want to admit that they screwed up once again.