Maybe people are over critical but the service and experience of a meal is not to be ignored. I'm sure you would agree that if they literally threw the food at you it wouldn't deserve a rating regardless of the food.
Some Amazon 1 star reviews: "great product, delayed by the post."
Ratings generally have become nonsensical. Between paid reviews, influencer reviews, bot-generated reviews, one-dimensional reviews that confuse multi-dimensional experiences, friends-and-family reviews, bucket reviews where you can't tell which product of a range is being reviewed (Amazon...), and hostile fake reviews, reviews have become all-but useless.
FWIW I had to pick a removals company recently, and I crossed one company off my shortlist when I found they used a suspect ratings company for their review listings. It's possible they were fine, but any company that pays to hide or remove bad reviews may easily not be.
I'm not sure if it's even possible to create a reliable independent review system. It might seems like a trivial problem, but given all the issues it's actually incredibly hard to get it right.
both ways have problems. when I'm dissatisfied with a place I want to help people not go there but let's say there are separate ratings for service, decor, food, atmosphere. I don't want to lie so if the food tasted like garbage but everything else was a 5 then it will look like I'm helping to recommend the place with 5 5 1 5 average 4 out of 5. 4 out of 5 sounds like a recommendation but what I really wanted to say is "don't go here!"
Those ratings shouldn't be averaged together though, because the weighting would be different for everyone. Each category would have its own average, and when I'm searching for a place, I would specify what I care about.