I've just switched WM from spectrwm to frankenwm (which doesn't have an inbuilt bar). I have had the same issues, but eventually got my spectrwm bar set up nicely. Cron job to pull wttr.in ever half hour (weather can change quickly and multiple times a day where I live) and everything else on a 2sec loop. I'm not too fussed about immediate updates. However the only thing that kinda bugged me was my volume level in the bar. It would be nice for the volume level to be updated immediately when pressing the vol keys.

I see you posted over in this thread where different solutions to this were offered, however I never succeeded with it unfortunately.

Since moving to frankenwm I'm, now using unibar which I suppose is similar to lemonbar but it's written in rust. This is a simple script I'm using at the moment. Fonts and colours etc are set in a simple ~/.config/unibar/uni.conf file.