You are confusing front-of-house with back-of-house staff.
No, I'm not. When I go to a restaurant, I talk to the wait staff and they relay my preferences to whomever is doing the cooking. I don't talk directly to the cook. There may be a better way to say what I said, but I am not confusing anything. The wait staff play a large role in making sure that picky orders turn out right and, in some cases, they do some of the work involved in putting the right meal together, though they don't cook it.
I know in part because I have special dietary needs, so I generally am a picky eater who has to ask for pretty much everything I eat to be tweaked and because I have had close relatives who worked in restaurants.
Hello Fresh, at least, has 8 or so available recipes per week. They'll pick 3 for me, but if I choose I can log in to their site and pick for myself.
I tried Hello Fresh and thought it was useful. As a capable cook, it still saved time I'd otherwise spend shopping (30 mins easily if you have a kid in tow) or wondering what to make (on nights I want to cook something new, I will spend 30+ minutes looking at cook books or recipe sites). Someone wanting a less hand-holdy experience could easily ignore the recipes and use it as a mystery box to invent from.
My wife and I have used meal-in-a-box services. We both tweak the recipes without reminders. They don't aim to replace a cook, because they still need a cook.
They mostly replace some of the effort of shopping, portioning, and some part of prepping, plus recipe discovery.
> If you can afford a meal-in-a-box service, why would you not just go to a restaurant
Because with a restaurant, I don't have a cook that will tweak to my tastes without detailed prompting.
> where the wait staff will do a decent job as a substitute for your own live-in cook
You are confusing front-of-house with back-of-house staff.
> Someone else decides what you will be eating and you have to do the cooking.
The ability to select from a menu of options prior to delivery would be an improvement for many of these services.