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It certainly matches my experience from as recently as the 1990s early 2000s. Small town restaurants were generally pretty bad, and the general quality of random suburban restaurants has increased pretty dramatically in the last fifteen-twenty years or so.
I don't totally understand why this would be the case. I think cooking is 90% knowing a recipe, so in theory all you should need is print technology to quickly spread quality cooking instruction, but in practice that didn't work. Even cooking TV shows couldn't do it. I've no idea why wide spread internet usage would be the game changer when those others failed, but it really matches the timeline based on my own experience. Maybe it was just Yelp.
It's not just knowing a recipe -- there is a bottleneck of skill (training of juniors can only really happen at a good restaurants, which requires skilled seniors, although culinary institutes cut some of that). There was also the lack of a nationwide supply chain of fresh ingredients. Heck, what like a third of the produce today is trucked from California's Central Valley, which wasn't even fully developed until after WWII. And even then there wasn't an interstate system to carry those trucks. There was also a lack of affluent customers until the automobile.
But yeah, the median gastro-pub burger is probably > 90th percentile in 1960. Even 95th.
Michelin (and later Yelp) did also help too, that's an important factor.
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That's one thing. Perhaps the level of the average restaurant has gone up. Probably has. But the claim that the best restaurant in the country in the late 1950s would be surpassed by tens of thousands of restaurant today? I don't believe that can be true. I think the very best chefs knew what they were doing back then, and further back in time too. People have always been obsessed with food and tried to do skillful preparation, even if the highest knowledge didn't necessarily pass on down to the lower classes.
Culinary fashions have changed, at least. I've been to a few semi-fancy restaurants (usually catering to an older clientele) and felt "blast from the past" about some of the menu choices: tortilla chips weren't standard at Tex-Mex places in the 60s, relying on demi glace or hollandaise on an otherwise-bland entree, or tossing some steamed vegetables on the side. On the cheaper side, I've been to small-town diners that, while IMO fine, seem to be someone's home cooking scaled up and offered for guests without formal chef training. I get the sense from movies (not a great historical source) that this was pretty common in the past, but that the bar has mostly shifted upwards or gotten more specialized.
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