The bell includes way more events, such as replies in threads you watch on random talk pages. Talk page messages are considered more important. It's like an email sent to a mailing list you are subscribed to vs. an email sent to you directly.

The main reason for being so obtrusive is that for newbies the talk page message is often a warning of the "cease and desist" variety, and if they don't notice it they might get blocked.

@Tgr thanks for the clarification. If I understand correctly: there should be a distinction between how we notify people that someone has written on their talk page vs. how we notify them of any other activity, with the talk page situation appearing significantly more noticeable/urgent? Let me know if I have that right and I will add this context to the task description.

I think so, yes. (I don't want to present my opinion as authoritative - I wasn't a maintainer of Echo when these conversations happened, and we are only nominally maintainers today because someone had to be, not because of a deep understanding of the product, so this is mostly my opinion as an editor.)

Arguably talk page notifications are a poor stand-in for a "warning" system, because plenty of talk page messages aren't really urgent either. But we don't have such a system, and the orange bars are better than nothing.

I’m probably not at the best place, but anyway: this extra link may break into a new line on narrower screens, which doesn’t look nice, and even overlaps with the content action tabs.

What about adding an extra icon to the user menu, like the one I proposed for Timeless in T215695#4959221?

I don't think anything is needed from Growth-Team, but if I'm mistaken please let us know.