With respect to bowling alleys, for things like professional shows or food safety it's a bit more than "nobody got fired for buying IBM". The stuff's gotta be able to survive field conditions and not cost millions of dollars in refunded show tickets or spoiled foods. Manufacturers test and make themselves accountable for this. Cheap, customized modules work until they don't, and by then the engineer who put the custom system together in the first place isn't there to fix them. Who would you call when some quick-and-dirty integration code that was burned into these embedded modules without ever being put in a source versioning system fails in some weird edge condition? OP is an SRE, it's ok for him, but the average farmer or show operator doesn't have the skill.
Just because a guy wears a fitted suit doesn't mean he'll be good at handling your money. Likewise if you buy tens of thousands of euros worth of incredibly overbuilt teutonic industrial equipment in matching colors and snap-in cabinets doesn't mean the guy who builds the PLC program in ladder logic will be any good at it - or that the next guy will have an easier time troubleshooting it than if the whole thing ran on an Arduino scavenged out of an intro to robotics kit.
Experts know there is stuff worth spending on, and there's stuff like the ESP32 where no amount of money will buy you something better, and no amount of money will save you, if the guy building the whole thing is an idiot.