I'm also using the stacked options in plt.hist with my own histogrammed data inputs. It's a lot more convenient to use plt.hist for this rather than plt.bar, which requires several calls working out the bottoms at each point. Implementing a stacked-like option in plt.bar doesn't make as much sense to me but I'm open to suggestions

My knee-jerk reaction is that I'm also against overloading hist for this. Maybe refactor the cumulative bar-making machinery in hist to a new method cumulativebar? Or add the functionality to bar itself if easily done.

Looks like because bar does not have a stacked option (or more generally does not allow for multidimensional input) you want to misuse hist to draw the bar graph instead.
There were suggestions on creating a bars or barplots function in the past, so I'd rather follow up on those:
There is #11048 which I fear everyone just forgot about. It seemed quite complete last time I checked, but now lost most of its content. Still the discussion is quite valuable.

#11048 would be useful. Any idea if that PR will continue?

Anyway, I'll close this for now