Quite late to the party, but I finally replaced Bartender on my Mac with a combination of these little status bar utilities:
Vanilla by Matthew Palmer for hiding some icons:
https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/
Menu Bar Spacing by @sindresorhus for narrowing down the spacing:
https://sindresorhus.com/menu-bar-spacing
Spaced by @sindresorhus for visually grouping icons:
https://sindresorhus.com/spaced
So happy with the new setup!