big sur finder sidebar

I have a similar issue. But not only Favorites, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, etc are not showing up. I also can't drag a folder into the sidebar. I was on Apple Support chart for a long time and we couldn't fix the issue. I ended up having to create a new user account on my Mac which worked but kind of a pain to set everything up again like a new computer.

Just poor design here. If you are going to have a collapsing favorites section, there needs to be some indicator that it is collapsed. And frankly what is the point of having the favorites section being able to be hidden or collapse? It frees up no screen real estate. The sidebar still hangs there. Yuck. You want to make it effective, move in the sidebar when I click favorites to hide it. That would the logical indicator it's hidden.

If you see the word "Favorites" on the top of the sidebar, hover the mouse to the right of the word until you see a downward arrow. Click it.