This is the first of a series of opinionated posts that I'm going to make about becoming an absolute master of VSCode shortcuts.

This Activity Bar is just something that takes up screen real estate and honestly its just useless.

Just setup keyboard shortcuts for the tabs that you use. These are what I use.

Cmd + Shift + E: File Explorer
Cmd + Shift + F: Find in files (Already the default)
Cmd + Shift + G: Source Control
Cmd + Shift + A: Active pull request
Option + Shift + D: Debug Panel

For panels which you use often, but not on the daily (for example: the extensions panel), you can just use the command palette. Cmd + Shift + P and type 'focus on...'.

Now you can safely get rid of it and on the off chance you might need to access the Activity Bar, you can just use the command palette again to bring it back :)