I have looked into this stuff and there is some pretty compelling evidence for shoes making people run faster, like your typical highly cushioned shoes. The reason barefoot shoes are good is because it is the equivalent of a manual transmission car, we are forced to learn how to actually make our feet do the right things for proper kinematics. The automatic transmissions still heavily beat any manual paired with a good driver in most races. So barefoot shoes aren't actually that great in certain contexts despite being very helpful for making our bodies do well. Once our body gets good at using barefoot shoes though we can use regular shoes and intuitively know that we are using it correctly which is also an advantage.

My balance of these things at the moment a pair of some shoes from wildling that are water resistant but not super breathable and a pair of boots from lems that have proper outdoor siping (not their other boots that have terrible siping) these boots are about as barefoot minded as you can get boots to be while still being functional boots. And that's it, just the 2 sets of shoes.

The biggest thing is realizing that our legs have a built in spring system for all this wear and tear that we put on it. Basically our ankles are springs and the travel those springs have is the amount of distance you can move your ankle to not stomp your heel on the ground except for when needing to make quick turns or standing still for balance, momentum is what gives us balance while moving forward just like a bike rolling.

People sometimes take that and think they need to dinosaur walk all the time lol, this is just saying that walking pains come from heel stomping too hard, its ok to touch it on the ground often.