McDonald’s is franchised to a whole bunch of individual owners in the United States. This is why you get such varying quality reports. Some franchisees are better at making the food tasty than others.
For example with French fries: to get good fries you have to keep the fryers at the right temperature, change the oil pretty regularly, and get the right amount of salt on the fries right when they come out. A bad franchisee will skimp on the oil changes, not fix the fryer thermostat, and he won’t care what the 16 year old does with the salt
One thing that McDonald’s is really good at with their franchise rules is food safety. It is quite rare for anyone to actually get food poisoning from McDonald’s. Probably rarer than many fine dining places where a lot more people touch your food, and they use a lot of manual cooking processes.
I preferred the Facebook group “If 2,147,483,648 people join this group, then an integer overflow may occur” back in the day.