How to fix macOS Big Sur Dock after having customised it on Catalina for uBar I had a sweet setup for using uBar for favourites and the MacOS Dock for seeing open applications before I upgraded to Big Sur.
I had used commands from this Ask Different question: Is there a way to completely disable Dock?
Even after I upgraded to Big Sur, everything for working fine perfectly. I toggled some Dock settings in System Preferences and now I'm unable to get the auto-hide working. It is inconsistent now. It doesn't always auto-hide and gets in the way of other windows by covering
them.

I only want to access the Dock using Cmd+Opt+D
I know the Dock will show up in the Launchpad and ^+Up and that is fine.

How do I fix this?
I tried commands from the same question for restoring dock as well, and restarted the MacBook Air multiple times.
Please help.
I executed commands from this HowToGeek article to reset the Dock and restarted the Mac; which didn't help (yet). I had used both the commands - &quot;The Simple Fix&quot; killall Dock and &quot;The Slightly Less Simple Fix&quot; defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock.
Then I relaunched the Finder as recommended in the same article and now I'm back to my fantasy setup.
Sorry for the bother, I hope this helps others as well. I had to set preferences for dock again. On Big Sur we no longer need to follow the Terminal commands from the Ask Different question mentioned above.