Middlemen are often a good idea, yes. Can you imagine if for every single item you wanted to buy you had to go to the original manufacturer? And now suddenly every manufacturer needs to also become a seller and distributor?
But they can deliver without being a middleman. E.g. they can work as contractors for the restaurant.
But now, instead, they are the ones taking the customer's orders, and hence they become the portal for the business (and thus, middlemen). Which is a bad situation for the restaurant owners.
Without middlemen every restaurant would have to be farm to table, which is a significant burden from many angles and would probably result in more shutting down than delivery services could.
Cutting out the middleman is great... but only when you run the numbers and it makes sense, not as a universal truth.
Are middlemen ever a good idea? What about middlemen that become the gatekeepers of your business.