Many great options here, for some more left field choices that are amazing if you are the right type of person - Braindead, The Big Door Prize, Pushing Daisies, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Schmigadoon.
All humorous, whimsical, mysterious, surprisingly dark at times. Wonderful things.
People will mention "Eureka" in this same space, I do not agree.
Just reflective of which spaces you are choosing to be in here. Go to shitposting communities when you need some silliness. Also feels like you are reacting to the general regression of the discission on reddit. I guess go back there if you need memes and movie quotes primarily, they'll have what you need. "Welcome to Costco, I love you!"
I said it was my own thesis, built from a decade plus in the trenches. If you read what I'd stated again, you'll see that the implication was not purely generational, but boomers/Xers with power who drove the change. You also over emphasis technicality here as I was purposefully discussing the more mundane, beginner to intermediate level daily tasks that the millenials were fulfilling here. The millennials in this group are typically in rightful awe of the old timers talents to build on the foundational level, and also envy their circumstance of walking into a more open sandbox and with more stakes to claim in the early days.
So basically, the above preceding doesn't really concern you unless you found your way to VP level or really to the csuite especially, and even then, always exceptions. That understood , I won't spend more time debating exceptions to the general rule, as I see it. I respect my elders, as long as they are decent people struggling to do better within these inherently broken systems.
This is 100% the thesis I've been shopping personally... Many Boomers and Xers in executive positions had a "magical millennial" that they quietly kept as a secret "AI" to split/edit PDFs, set up an Airtable base, add columns to a google doc, etc. There was a tacit, silent agreement in this symbiotic relationship for the bulk of the last 20 years - you'll make sure I don't look completely incompetent in tech matters and I'll backchannel on your behalf to senior leaders and people who "matter" to help you advance.
Gen AI essentially allows the laziest input, gives a half competent output that "feels" fine and has the bonus of telling the boomer/Xer that they are actually amazingly capable, and could have done this themselves all along even, but they rightly delegated the task to their magical millennial, and now to the AI of choice.
So they fired all the magical millennials, because they knew too much about the before times. Now that they are fucked without a life raft, costs soar and they will cling for dear life because they will be exposed otherwise.
Edit: through a twist of fate, the iPad kids grew up technically incapable and relied on the magical millenials as well. They could only offer praise and loyalty really, or a boomer, Xer recruited them in and talked the MM up as a "wiz" to seek out. Anyway, now that the MM are gone, the Zoomers and gen Alpha kids only have one strength remaining, the old people have no idea what they are doing or how to quantify their success, outside of "use more AI". So the fragile balance remains for now, with a vulnerable, hollow center where the magical millennials used to live.
IME, servers generally feel pretty firmly entitled to those high wages collectively at the end of the day, they live pretty well outside of work compared to BOH and it's typically less serious work for them as it's more likely to be a "stop" rather than a career (which is more likely for a kitchen worker).
Nothing stops them from having a personal policy to split tips out the kitchen 20-50% and/or organizing other servers and petitioning management for a formal process. I've seen some that do, but very rare.
It's a hierarchy like anything else - the owners are doing wage theft at scale and collecting way more profit than they should, the servers are collecting tips as the final mile face representing a lot of people in back literally navigating knives, fire and very heavy lifting. On balance, they get more than they should (when I was in kitchens, the servers routinely cleared 3 - 4x more annually than the cooks - talking mid 30s for kitchen versus over 100k for servers all told). And the cooks are just working, sacrificing their bodies and personal relationships until their knees give out at 35 and the weaker ones are addicts to cope with it all.
We just live in a culture in the US where the predominant voices you hear are the public (customers) and servers themselves. The servers have selfish motivations and the public have an inherent guilt for making others "serve" them and for being half educated on the server's "perilous plight". And again, cooks are quieter in the mix by nature and busy working, so you don't really hear their voice.
So yes , the system is fucked, needs major reform, owner class is the driver, but the servers are in the passenger seat silently enjoying the ride. The cooks are in the trunk, with a speaker playing an audiobook about how difficult things are for the servers.
Give up physical media and own nothing.
Time to do some reading... https://dervis.de/physical/