> It's challenging, because we got the restaurants first, and we didn't have millennia of home-cooked tradition built up before the restaurants arrived.

That's a bit ahistorical, so your analogy is actually better than you think.

Computers started out essentially hand built one at a time and hand programmed by changing the wiring (this is analogous to building and cooking over an open fire). Gradually (but quickly) they progressed through craft and guild stages to the point that computers were being mass produced, at which point software was being physically traded on spools of magnetic tape (analogous to cooking for your family, band, clan, tribe & trading recipes with other cooks, marketplaces for staples and specialized implements), then software & patches being posted to Usenet and emailed around (cookbooks, large-scale food production, the local inn, home kitchens), and only then did software start to become a product that people mostly bought and used rather than making yourself unless you had to.

The closest food analogy to this transition is probably baking bread, which was quite specialized for a while (even if you had a kitchen with a stove and used it, you almost certainly bought your bread, and even if you baked your own bread, you definitely bought your flour) and technology had a strong role in decentralization by making home kitchen ovens reliable and common, although any baking you did was probably cakes rather than bread. This was equivalent to the personal computer and operating systems vs. applications.

You can extend the analogy further and say that modern smartphones and app stores are like an an apartment with a kitchenette that only has a microwave oven so all your food is bought pre-packaged at the supermarket. Sometimes you go out to eat, sometimes you order pizza delivered, sometimes you grab fast-food.

In all this the restaurant (an evolution of the inn) hasn't gone away, and in fact some of those restaurants scaled up to the point that the pre-packaged food you buy has restaurant branding (eg. Marie Calendar's).

No-code solutions (starting with IFTTT) are a lot like making your own sandwiches from store-bought ingredients, including pre-sliced bread.

Now, you're pointing out that the computer software equivalent transition from cooking all your own food to centralized and industrialized food production and preparation only took an eyeblink in comparison, but you are wrong in stating that software production didn't go through all the same stages of evolution and just sprang fully formed into the equivalent of restaurants and microwaved meals, or that the food production and preparation value chain wasn't subject to the same kind of technology-driven swings between centralization and decentralization as software, they just don't apply to all parts of the chain at the same rate which can lead to reversals in other parts of the chaoin.

For example, industrialization of appliances wasn't the only development that pushed decentralization of food preparation; canned vegetables, refrigerated transportation, gas/electric/water infra, increasing sophistication of ready-to-use ingredients, and other similar developments were necessary and responsible too.

So, basically, this sort of irregular ratchet that always moves in the direction of standardization and industrialization sometimes pushes some particular layer toward centralization, and sometimes toward decentralization, sometimes adds more layers on top, and this has been just as true for food as it is for software.