Right now I generally never read Roblox’s notifications under the News tab simply because I never know when they’ve actually sent a new news message. This is mainly because of 2 issues:
1: News is never marked as unread when you open it, so I go blind to the red notification bubble and never notice when there’s actually something new to read.
I would actually prefer that the sidebar counter be removed entirely. Like you mentioned, when there’s always a notification you go blind to it, so when someone always has unread PMs they’ll never pay any heed to the notifications in the sidebar. With the notification stream, I can disable PM notifications so I never have unmanageable notifications that are always there in the stream – whenever I get a notification, it’s something I can take action on.