Franchise failure rates don’t bear out that being a real risk. However, McDonald’s is publicly traded, and investor pressure to improve at the margins may make a business that is fundamentally well served by being change-averse do stupid things.
McDonalds is currently 46,000, 13k of those in the US alone. It's just not even comparable.
Nobody's too big to fail, and the way you fail is by making no innovation in your business, not doing optimizations that smarter competitors do, etc. (which was exactly what Kmart spent the 80s and 90s doing).
McDonald's would absolutely decline if they simply abandoned all 'loyalty program' ideas, while every competitor leverages them, because those competitors will take customers away little by little. Fewer customers, less money to justify renovations, less people want to open new franchises in the best spots, leading to fewer customers, in a cycle.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/kmart/comments/1jiusko/the_last_us_...