Sushi, in particular, strikes me as a strange thing to list: for what criteria is sushi so clearly the superior answer that it spread and pushed out other competitors?

I'm not a connoisseur, but I'm sure if you asked a Sushi fan they could tell you.

The world's burger bars appear to be just as intact as the sushi bars, in point of fact.

Good point. The franchise burger chain was another excellent innovation that spread like wildfire ... a special kind of wildfire that doesn't kill people and where getting burnt is both entirely optional and quite pleasant. In this case I can explain some of the advantages:

• Consistency: you can travel widely and yet be able to trust that the food served, prices, and style of restaurant will be the same.
• Low capital cost for parent: a company like McDonalds could open a very large number of franchises quickly without too much capital investment.
• Strong incentives: direct ownership by the franchisee meant the local manager's incentives were very strongly aligned with the parent company.
• Replicating best practices: franchises can learn best practices from the parent, which is incentivized to share
• Incentivizing operational research: the parent company is incentivized to discover new and more efficient ways to run a restaurant, as it can easily spread them to its franchisees.

why are frequentist statistics still the standard in most of science?

Because they are easy, and frequently good enough. In cases where the difference matters (Machine Learning, some areas of Finance) it's very bayesian.

Furthermore, I don't think the field of statistics would have been improved if the government had appointed a Statistics Tsar to crack down on anyone using non-ideologically-compliant techniques.

And of course, "threaten to shoot them" is a libertarian applause light.

I'm not sure this is true here. According to the original article,

Most applause lights ... can be detected by a simple reversal test... [If] the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information.

Yet here this is not the case. Some people really do advocate threatening to shoot people who disagree: revolutionaries explicitly, and many other people implicitly - including you. The phrase is conveys information - it shows how many people apply fail to hold politicians, policemen and the state more broadly to the moral standards they ordinarily use to judge people.

edit: unclear sentence structure fixed