I worked in this industry in a few ways - indirectly (my family owned and operated restaurants), directly (working in my family's restaurants), and adjacent (I ran product for a restaurant reservation platform). There's a couple of dynamics to be aware of here, some of which have been called out:

- It's a rough job, and the labor economics are all skewed. Even pre-pandemic restaurants were struggling with balancing tipped pay with kitchen pay through a variety of approaches. Removing tipping had very mixed results.

- A lot of restaurant workplaces are very toxic, through a combination of the culture, bad management, etc. While there are a lot of small businesses where the owner/manager are bad, restaurants have disproportionately high staffing requirements, which means that the bad managers impact a larger number of people

- Lack of career advancement. At the low end of the restaurant market, people tend to just age out after early adulthood, or take a management track job. At the mid-range of the market, you might bounce around from place to place, but there's not really a path up and out. At the high end there's the most opportunity, but even then the salaries are not that high, and many of the better paying FOH jobs (captain, somm, GM) have been consolidated down to reduce labor costs

- Restaurants are not confident enough yet to understand what their business looks like in a post-pandemic world. That is making them hesitant to make transformative shifts like salaried servers (non-tipped) or investing in career development for kitchen staff. It's a lot easier to contemplate these things when you have a general sense of what the next few years look like, and I think there's just a general sense of unease about what comes next.

I love restaurants, it's something I really enjoy, and while I understand the people who just want to get fed and get on with their lives, I think the hospitality aspect of it (for me) can be nice. I think the industry as a whole has been structured unsustainably for years, though, and the pandemic just accelerated what would have become clear over the next 5-10 years.

EDIT: one last factor - I think there was also an ever-increasing shift towards higher expectations from customers. Shows like top chef, better access to ingredients, and casual chains with higher standards have raised the bar for everyone. I think that's good for diners, but there's a lot of restaurants that were already going to struggle to compete and the pandemic also is accelerating their demise.