"Patty melt" style burgers are generally less reliant on meat quality as long as you can get a good, crunchy, umami seat on the thin mean patty or patties.
I suspect the thicker higher end style burgers would be more reliant on the quality of the beef.
However, for economic reasons, they are probably the necessary target of impossible meat until they reach a scale large enough to compete with cheap beef.
In-N-Out meat is pretty good; it's just super thin. McDonald's is not good, but believe me, if McDonald's had a good burger patty, and if they wanted to freeze it, it wouldn't be any worse for it.
On the other side of things, In-N-Out doesn't freeze their fries, and they're much worse than the frozen fries from places like McDonald's or Shake Shack's crinkle-cut fries, and it's specifically because they don't do the fry-freeze-refry process critically important for great fries.
from http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-h...
I do, because I'm not a restaurant, and I don't buy enough meat for one or two servings of hamburger. If a restaurant's been around long enough and has enough turn over, they won't have my problem, but a place could want to freeze for time reasons, or to help with getting a gnarly crust by cooking it from frozen, etc. If you're freezing with the kind of thing the NYC sushi guys use (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/nyregion/sushi-fresh-from-...), and defrosting properly, a truly great hamburger could easily be made from a frozen patty.
I've never heard of a good prefrozen hamburger patty unless you're getting something from Snake River Farms or something along those lines (they ship frozen meat). I freeze my own.
Same goes for fresh bread. Maybe they want to serve pastrami sandwiches in Manhattan, but the best rye bread they can find is in Detroit, and so they have their baker freeze the bread and ship it over. It's not that the bread is better because it was frozen, but they're able to get better bread because they could freeze it.
https://www.dti.dk/_/media/66980_Effect%20of%20packaging,%20... (PDF!)
Freezing food has a stigma that it doesn't deserve if the freezing and thawing is done with care. As I mentioned before, the best sushi restaurants in Manhattan all freeze their fish and store it in extremely cold freezers, and there's no significant detriment to quality. If Shake Shack wanted to do so, they could freeze their patties, and they'd still have one of the best restaurant burgers out there. They certainly would not be freezing their meat in the way that was done in that burger paper, nor would they be using meat of that quality.
Long story short: freezing brisket, not a great plan.
1. It's unlikely that Impossible Foods will ever match the quality of a grass-fed, grain-finished 80/20 chuck + short rib blend from a purveyor like Pat LaFrieda.
2. The dish is heavily spiced and the Impossible Foods product is playing the role of the bolognese. It can hide under the seasoning and spices.
3. I still think the product is valuable. The vast majority of meat product Americans consume meets a much lower bar. I think Impossible Foods already makes a product that's better than the ground meat that goes into a lot of fast food chains. If you didn't tell people, I suspect they'd prefer a Taco Bell or White Castle product made with Impossible Foods instead of the "mix" that they currently use.
A good hamburger, on the other hand, relies almost entirely on the flavor of the beef.
There's an informal rule in cooking about how the simpler a dish is, the better your ingredients and technique have to be, because there's nothing to hide behind.