It is not for tech sake, this is building a database. Never attribute to incompetence what can be adequately explained by bogus engagement KPIs

Most of the restaurants I've been to the QR code takes you to a PDF of the menu as found on the restaurant's website. There's no auth and no way to track anything beyond I guess how many times people opened the menu file. Restaurants aren't doing this for tracking, they're doing it to stay on the good side of public health regulations in a period where they've learned they can be forcibly closed with barely any warning.

Orders are typically stored anyways?

But not how long you stared at the deserts, or what side of the "give me lobster" button you pressed.

Maybe eventually; I haven't seen a PointOfSale system that worked remotely well enough I thought they could be competent to implement in a useful way.

I tend to not jump to malicious that can be attributed to virtue signaling and/or incompetence.

Meaningless and trivial metrics, ultimately. Third order at best.

Probably, but it is still data that is cheap to store. IF someone can find something useful in just 1% of those things 10 years from now all the cost to collect and store all that data will be worth the investment - or so they hope. They probably will too - the cost vs reward is very skewed.

The idea of menu costs is an extremely important one in restaurant economics. Sure laminated menus may last a while but they're a pain in the ass to change. If the restaurant wants to add an item or change the prices they're pretty much out of luck. None of the 30 or so restaurants I've been to post pandemic have had physical menus which is definitely not ideal, but I don't see them going back to having non zero menu costs.

A few here went the opposite route. Print the menu doublesided with a standard B&W laser printer. Every customer gets a new menu and it does not cost a ton extra.