To complete the thought, the baker example is explicitly in opposition to OP's point. In the economy we exist in, a 3am artisan baker does so explicitly out of a care for craft and community.
The pandemic as a whole stomped the gas on an already running process of money being trapped in the hands of the uber rich, and if none of it is coming back down, then the amount of money everyone has to spend necessarily shrinks too. And this is not my usual pinko-commie-scum ass set of thoughts. This is a well understood principle that many economists have been banging on about for years now, because even those who believe capitalism is the best system, though I disagree with them on much, also understand that if all the damn money goes to the rich and stays there then the entire party ends REAL quick and probably violently.
And then corporate breadmakers came in and made it impossible to compete from a price standpoint. Quality disappeared, and variety was subsequently crushed. The only people keeping his businesses open for a while were those who had fortunes that existed from owning a ton of land. They still wanted their oval loaves and fresh french bread and muffins.
The reality is most people don't want to spend more money for higher quality goods. Or, if they do, it's on a limited set of goods based on personal preference.
As for those rich people, they generally have atrocious taste. They will drop big bucks on high priced wine, or more generally, restaurants. They stay at resorts on vacation and fly business class. We do go to Paris, and stay in a cheap AirBnB out in the 19th, and we fly steerage. We make most of our meals in the AirBnB, and... wait for it... eat food out of artisan vendors. I don't think we've ever spent more than $150 for a restaurant meal in the EU and most of the time it is less than $50. Those rich people we know would never ever spend the time to go to a great bakery. Why would they? That would take time mingling with the plebes, and who cares? Bread is bread. Impossible to play the status game on that.
The problem with the economics of artisan products is that the number of people, income immaterial, who would go out of their way to spend more on an apex product is, economically speaking, a set of measure zero. Low bid rules our world. This is the reason that at scale corporate chains produce the shit that they do, because that shit industrial product is lower cost and nearly everyone prefers that.
We don't, but we don't matter.
Fuck the rich. But they're not the problem here.
edit: improve accuracy
The problem I see is volume. Once an "artisan" baker is running an operation scaled up to likely more than one restaurant, how do they remain artisan? Why doesn't Baumol's cost disease apply?