> don't want my food messed with

If someone has the mentality that they are free to spoil your food because they won't get a (good) tip, then they don't deserve to be paid at all, let alone be tipped well.

There's a lot of things the US has that are extremely strange, and the tipping culture is amongst them.

> a feudal practice of wealth transfer

Quite fitting description. But since we are no feudal lords, I would also describe tipping as the daily power trip of the plebes.

I think tipping at its very best is an opportunity to give a stranger a small gift. I recognize your points -- sometimes it feels like an obligated payment and probably in nearly all cases the capital owning class could and/or should contribute more, but i think you're excluding some optional perspectives. Sometimes I just want to help someone have a nice day by giving them something they didn't expect, like a generous tip. The escalation of niceness and virtue signalling seems right now to be creating an expectation of that generosity, which undermines it, since it can feel non-optional, but sometimes it's still just a nice thing one human can do to recognize another human.