To be honest I don’t use the center cluster all that much but when I do I shift my whole hand over. I used an Atreus62 as my daily driver for a long time so I got used to relying on a second layer. I have arrow keys under hjkl and still use those out of habit most of the time; however, I like having the dedicated keys in the center for combinations like ctrl+shift+arrow, etc.
Also, having the center cluster separates the left and right sides to a comfortable distance similar to the Kinesis Advantage (Which was also my daily driver for a long time) without wasting space by having nothing there.