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!