Neither Chicago nor San Francisco have takedown restaurant cultures, and both have relatively spectacular restaurant scenes.

Some of this gets to what you're looking for from a restaurant. If you're looking at food as an art form, and only want to spend time getting exposure to the very best of it, NYC may indeed be a better filter for you. If what you want is a Great Neighborhood Restaurant, which is perhaps Great in ways that make it distinctive regionally or even nationally, I think Chicago is a better bet than LA.

I think you could almost describe this in the context of only positive-reinforcement cultures vs positive-reinforcement and negative-reinforcement cultures. Both approaches seem to work well in the long-term, but the city which also has negative-reinforcement might have 'failures' more often, which could be seen as a positive from the POV of looking at the health of the whole system, but on the other hand could be seen as needlessly cruel to individuals.

But it's also a question of whether you want the culture to optimize for peak artistic quality, or whether you want the median restaurant to be really good. There are some kinds of food for which the NYC median is higher than everyone else's, but for a lot of it, I wonder whether the Chicago median is better even when the NYC maximum is better.

New York has a level of diversity and quality (for $25/meal or less) which I've never seen anywhere else. It also has a ton of tourist trap ripoffs, but those are easy to avoid in the internet age.

I may also be ~8 years out of date; maybe NYC's culture has improved.

Also, look, let's be clear: NOBODY is arguing that there's a more important restaurant scene in the US than NYC's.