> It seems insane that McDs franchisors would tolerate this

Their hands are bound. The situation arises from the contract whose terms are dictated by McD HQ. The relationship is entirely asymmetric.

The only working remedy in form of the Kytch add-on got nuked from orbit.

I too, like, apparently many others here, have worked a soft-serve machine.

My understanding is that the McD one is different and tries to remove the need for disassembly and cleaning at the end of the day. I imagine McD making so many different things with so many different machines requiring all sorts of different maintenance this is a useful optimization as opposed to a Dairy Queen.

That was my reaction to the video: Aren't there franchisors with many stores in a large metro area that can actually carry a lawsuit or get together with other franchisors to start a class-action lawsuit?

Why would they? As long as their business is profitable, there is no reason to launch a lawsuit that could cost them their business just for some repair cost.

Imagine you have 50 EC2 instances and each of them suffers 15% downtime monthly. Amazon is asking money to reboot them and get them up and running.

That's different isn't it? Those McDonalds aren't completely shut down, but suffers 'performance' issues where they still have most of their revenue, just not all of what they would regularly have. And your business don't depend on AWS, while most McDonalds restaurants do depend on McDonald to have a business to begin with.