I've come around to the other side of this in a way. I used to think "wow they don't care at all" the same way I previously looked at menus clearly made in MS Word: The place will probably be cheap and they don't care about having fancy menu design.
From there, it's two possibilities:
-They care about the food at the expensive of design and it's going to be cheap and great (good) -They care about the food as much as the design and it's going to suck (bad)
This switch happened after a new place opened in my neighborhood that had AI signage and is now my favorite lunch spot.
Perhaps in part Berkson’s paradox in action? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox
Possibly, but I think it’s a bit more intuitive than that. It’s basically just like companies with terrible websites:
Most of them are terrible because they no longer exist, have no budget because they’re not making money, or because they’re bad at doing things generally.
But then there’s a set of companies that do fantastically well and are so busy serving customers (or are satisfied with their results) that their website doesn’t matter. In that case, the bad website is an indicator for a good product.