Honestly Niri is the only WM i've used where you really don't need a bar at all. I maybe use all of 2 workspaces on it because honestly you don't really need it and to tell the time I had a script piped into dunst where I could just pull up the time via a keybind ala cagebreak or I also have it scripted into tmux along with battery status.

Also Niri just works right out of the box. spent the past week fighting with DWL+NixOS trying to get it to work as I somehow borked all xwayland applications via a patch or a config. Went back to Niri just for the ease/minimal config.