If you don’t use the percentage indicator for the battery then the icon is basically gone. I don’t get why this got passed their QA. And like you mention, there are more important things to fix, that might be fixed with the same time effort. Like this one: WiFi/mobile traffic arrows in status bar
But hopefully a batch of improvements are coming soon. By now I expect them to work on these improvements for Android 12. Let’s hope their QA is more on top of things for that release.