Restaurant dishwashers use an enormous amount of water. They require a hot water supply that’s much hotter than residential heaters typically supply. They require a more complete manual pre-rinse and scrub. They only accept kitchenware that’s made for them and destroy the rest.
Restaurants cycle dishes a lot during a single mealtime. Homes don’t. I don’t think “I can’t wait 2 hours” is typically a real problem.
Those I've used in the UK aren't so bad, they're cold fill only with a heating element in the sump. It takes maybe 15 minutes to fill and get up to temperature at the start of a shift, after that each cycle is ~2 minutes.
The hot water is recirculated during the wash, the rinse uses fresh water from the tap with the excess going out an overflow.
A little sump water gets replaced every cycle, but enough stays that it's back up to temperature before you've emptied and refilled it.
There's also a small peristaltic pump to top up the detergent directly from the bottle.
Not much benefit in a home setting unless you fancy having it hot and ready 24/7 though.
They also have the clever system of standardised, removable baskets. Need to increase dishwashing throughput? yank the clean basket, line them up on the counter to dry, and run a new basket through
This is probably the one trick consumer dishwashers should emulate
The problem in basically any consumer kitchen is storage - having racks and racks of stuff under your big stainless steel commercial countertops is no problem.
Dishwashers? How dare you. We preferred to be called “Sanitation Engineers - Dishwashing Division” Even had bossman put it on our paystub (he was so tolerant of us kids. I think he was just happy that we were into buffoonery and not meth).
It was definitely one of the more tame activities at work. We would golf rotten potatoes into the field behind the restaurant. Play Celery Generals with traffic, make Concoctions and get the waitresses to test and rate them, and we had an entire WWF wrestling league (that was exclusively judged by the entrance strut and banter; there was never any actual wrestling). Sometimes we’d make new pizza recipes and present them to the kitchen staff of the pizza shop next door. Their contribution to the bit was to act incredibly Italian in their wholesale rejection of our pie. Sometimes we’d even do work.
I think it's just a perception thing. I don't see emptying the dishwasher as part of the task that is filling it. My last task of the day is normally turning the dishwasher on and to me my task list feels finished. In some sense the tasks related to dishwasher for a day are "empty -> fill -> turn on".
You could use your same type of reasoning for food/cooking. When you buy food and put it in the fridge to cook later, you haven't finished the task. I think that's more a way of feeling permanently uncomfortable with things not being finished. There is no end state for most things in the house. Work is never done.
Restaurants cycle dishes a lot during a single mealtime. Homes don’t. I don’t think “I can’t wait 2 hours” is typically a real problem.