You might both be interested in https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/my-journey-to-the-microwav... regarding the history of microwave cooking (not mine). The microwave oven wasn't known destined to be relegated to lowbrow cookery from the beginning, even if that's how it turned out from our perspective, and some of the more advanced techniques developed for it fell out of use.
Neat article.
I think it is interesting (though I only partially agree) that microwave meals require standardization to scale. Let's say that was true, why couldn't a modern microwave have a small camera and a set of heuristics for how to cook just about anything by turning the gun on and off at particular points when it recognizes a food? Maybe without intelligence, a microwave does need standardization; but we can put intelligence (ideally offline) in just about anything these days?
I wonder if with sufficient control if a microwave could ever brown? I wonder if it could reliably bake?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tg3-93jKvc - Chicken Good!