I work out of rental kitchens. Few things.

#1 the dream of being a professional painter is to have your works in the Louvre, but that doesn't stop you from enjoying your small gallery openings at the beginning of your career. You have to start somewhere.

#2 Opening your own restaurant is hella expensive and takes fucking forever. It's hard to explain the hell that is building a restaurant, and I don't even live in NY or SF where it's worse. You can get a product launched in a software company for less. The upside to a software company is a whole lot bigger though, so there's a lot less investment in restaurants. And I don't know if you know many chefs, but they tend to not have much money.

#3 there are all sorts of kitchens you're not thinking of where the space is rarely utilized, or frequently underutilized. VFW, church, and other social halls. Small food producers. Etc. This is money wasted to the owner. It's a win-win when those places get food trucks and ghost kitchens.

#4 a ghost kitchen isn't that dissimilar to owning a food truck. In fact a lot of them come from food trucks who have to operate out of some commissary anyway and want the stability of selling stuff year round.

#5 You're still doing most of the things in a ghost kitchen you do in any other restaurant, you just don't have tables. You still have a brand. You still develop a menu. You still manage employees. You still source ingredients. Etc. You just put stuff in a box instead of a plate and don't have a front of house (which, frankly, most chefs suck at anyway) to deal with.

The entire food industry is a bad business model for most of the people involved somehow.

The owner (of the restaurant concept) and the chef are often the same person in operations like this. It might take less capital to get off the ground than a full-scale restaurant. Almost certainly less, considering you have to do all the same things in a restaurant, plus hire and decorate front of house. By corollary, there's less at risk by trying a cloud kitchen first. It's a way to fail inexpensively.

More generally, most people don't have the luxury to simply do whatever they would optimally prefer to. They generally have to trade off preferences and pragmatics. Dreams don't put food on the table. So if there's a niche, in evolution or business, something is going to fill it eventually.

It's orders of magnitude less. Where I live, in a very cheap part of the country, I could buy a failed restaurant with enough of the pieces in place to not have to build out (permitting is a nightmare in the food world) for let's say $50k. That'd be a bad place in a bad area with most of the appliances gone. But I'd still have a hood and sprinklers and plumbing, so I'd be able to sink another $50k in and have a kitchen running before too long. If I wanted a bad failed restaurant somewhere that might actually bring foot traffic, double that cost.

Or I can rent a commissary kitchen for $18/hr, plus $100-$200/mo or so in dry and refrigerated storage, and scale from there. I could get started in a week.

To most chefs, this is the difference between "I can afford this now" and "I will literally never in my entire life be able to afford this."

I think this is right. The barriers to entry are lower and they have time to perfect menus and recipes. That said, the delivery element changes the way a chef is going to think about food. I see this model as being super helpful for food trucks (that have already have a customer following) to extend their sales during the down months or bad weather days.

For some/many, the joy is in the cooking and everything else is a pain.