Some tips:

Customise it to your liking in the keyboard pref pane.

You can press-and-drag on volume and brightness buttons of the collapsed control strip. No need to tap then slide.

You can create services (now Quick Action) in Automator and they show up with the Show Quick Actions setting set. Since services can be contextual (input+app) you can get creative and do some whacky stuff in there. I have contextless Safari and Terminal there to pop up new windows whatever the focused app is.