Restaurants are changing right now. I'm in the industry and see it all over the place in all different concepts and types of establishments. There's a lot going on that the whole covid mess has accelerated timelines on adopting or brought to a head early.
1) Chain fast food and minimum wage increases, chains are looking to run as lean as possible to keep staffing costs down, shutting down dine in has been in the works since the whole push for higher minimum wages. Owner/Operators tried telling everyone at the beginning of it all, I can't pay 50 people $15 an hour to sell $2 hamburgers. Franchisees are all on board cause hey, I can open up 5 locations if they only cost 500,000 for a drive up/takeout config, or I can open 1 2.5 million dine in location.. which would you do?
2) High turnover, no one wants to work at McDonalds for 10 years, they're lucky to get 10 weeks out of an employee. So, things have to be as simple as possible for them, so everyone is cutting menus, everone, fast food, fast casual, family dining, everyone just look at any non mom and pop place and compare their menu to last years. Supply chain issues just have given them the excuse they needed, you can look for it, if you're in a chain place and there is a single use item let's say grilled trout filet and it's not used anywhere else in other dishes, bet on it, trout fillet will be getting dropped soon.
3) Millennials bah, I know they get blamed for everything but in this case it's true, they're the demographic everyone is trying to capture and the image of 2 of them sitting on a couch not talking to one another and ordering delivery rather than going out to eat is dead on accurate. Yum (Pizza Hut) has specifically been telling existing and new franchisees not to open a sit down restaurant and do delivery/takeout only like Papa Johns, Little Ceasers, Dominos, etc and that's happening with major players in every segment you can name that isn't high end dining. It's to the point that places you wouldn't expect are looking at operating out of shared ghost kitchens with NO way to get food from them except to order online and take delivery.
And as far as bad service right now, you have the perfect storm of 90+% of all the pre covid staff for places got let go, went on unemployment and made more on that then they did working, so when the restaurant opened back up they didn't go back, the ones they did hire are all not trained worth a crap, the training managers who could help are spread thin and can't travel except locally by car and they've got lines rapped around the building most all day because so many other places are still closed so they don't care if they mess up. What are you gonna do, get back in line and wait another 30 minutes to get an order corrected? Oh, you're mad now and just want a refund.. did you happen to notice the no refunds and due to covid restrictions we cannot exchange food sign?
Your best bets for better food than out of a bag are mom and pop places, and they're being raped by all this, even in the little small town I live in there are maybe 15 small mom and pop places, I think 3 are open for dine in, 2 more are carry out only because they're so small they would only be able to set 2-3 tables with the distance restrictions right now and the rest have been closed since the shutdown order. Sadly I think most of those that are still closed won't ever open back up at this point which is a shame because a couple of them have been open and ran by the families since the 50s and 60s and the rest someone poured their life savings and hard work into.