How to set up fixed spacing / bar width for bar chart

I have a horizontal bar chart with a dynamic number of series. We have set up this chart to display up to 8 bars at a time with pagination, which is working great when you have at least 8 bars.

However, when there are less than 8 bars to display (or if you're on the last page and there's less than 8 bars there), the display of the chart is just not good. For example, if there are two bars, it spreads the bars very far apart from each other:

BAD BAR CHART

Our design team wants to have:

a) All bars precisely 8px tall (bars should not get wider or narrower than this, but should always be exactly this width)

b) All bars should be spaced 24px apart.

c) If there aren't enough bars to fill the whole space, they should align to the top of the chart and leave whitespace below. The bars should always remain 24 px apart.

In essence, this is what a good chart would look like:

GOOD BAR CHART

I don't need Highcharts to worry about whether the bars will fit in the chart or not. I'm already controlling for pagination and ensuring the bars will fit in the space provided. I just want a fixed bar height and fixed bar padding.

My question is - is it even possible to achieve the target design with highcharts, or do we need to look for another library for this? It would be unfortunate to have to do this one chart in a separate framework, but we can't leave it as is with two giant bars or two tiny bars with a big gap in between them, it just doesn't look good.

I've tried using the options for pointPadding, groupPadding (which I thought should handle the spacing between the bars, and pointWidth in various combinations, along with dynamically setting the height of the chart based on the # of bars. None of these options gave me what I was looking for:

1. By setting pointWidth, you can fix the width of the bars but then you can't control the distance between them

2. Setting groupPadding, honestly, was never able to get me the right padding distance, even with pointWidth unset. At best I was able to get the bars about 32px apart, still 33% too far. And with this, the width of the bars would become overly large (sometimes as much as 50px tall).

3. Setting the height of the chart dynamically, again I was unable to get the padding between the groups less than about 32px. If I made the chart shorter than this, the bars would simply overflow without reducing their padding further. Changing groupPadding / pointPadding had no impact on this.

Figured this out - there's another property, chart.spacingTop / spacingBottom, which seems to have a much more direct impact on how much space goes between the bars. You can adjust this together with the pointWidth to achieve the desired effect:

<!-- begin snippet: js hide: false console: true babel: false -->

<!-- language: lang-js -->

    chart: {
    ...
      spacingTop: -15,
      spacingBottom: (8 - (series[0]?.data?.length ?? 0)) * 55,
    },
    
    ...
    plotOptions: {
      bar: {
      ...
        pointWidth: 8,

<!-- end snippet -->

Got the idea from this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26301028/highcharts-stacked-bar-how-to-remove-spacing-between-bars?rq=2