FWIW, I've made my 2017 13" MBP with Touch Bar work as a developer. The secret is to use Ctrl-[ instead of the Esc button.
Granted, I also don't do much in Xcode, so I imagine I could be way more annoyed if that wasn't the case.
That said, I'm considering either the 2019 16" MBP (refurb) or waiting until hopefully the final Intel 16" is released (supposedly later this year/early next), mainly for screen real estate and GPU/additional cores. I imagine if I end up waiting much longer, it'd make more sense just to wait for the ARM version or possibly switch to PC.