Image comparison triggers are currently disabled in Bartender 5, unfortunately in macOS Sonoma Bartender cannot get images of menu bar items without macOS showing a purple "Screen capture" menu bar item (the new API for image capture can not get images of hidden menu bar items still).
For the image comparison triggers Bartender would very often need to get images of the meun ar items to do the comparison so the purple macOS menu bar item would always show.
Because of this Image comparison triggers are currently disabled in Bartender 5.
With Bartender 5 you now have triggers with more trigger conditions (I will be adding more) so you can still show menu bar items or even better sets of items when they are needed. If there is ever a way to bring back the image comparison trigger type I will do.
I am also considering having an Advanced option that is basically "I don't care about the purple "Screen capture" menu bar item" and lets you use image comparison triggers again, but this needs consideration.
With macOS 14.1 Apple implemented changes I requested so I could recreate this feature without macOS showing the screen capture purple menu bar item.
Any previous image comparison show for updates from Bartender 4 should automatically be converted into triggers for you.
This is now available in Bartender 5.0.45 (which at time of updating this was still a test build)