Those breadsticks are no joke to the corporate investors whose opinions matter at Olive Garden. Their internal corporate
documents have been leaked repeatedly. Customer experience in the restaurant experiences a make-or-break point with breadstick service. If breadsticks are served too infrequently, customers make up for this by requesting more than one or two at a time. However, the chain (Darden) acknowledges that after 7 minutes, the quality of the breadstick has deteriorated, leaving people less likely to eat it and resulting in waste. So ideally, you're looking at a breadstick service that is asking people whether they need an additional breadstick every 7 minutes.
Part of what people don't realize about the popularity of Olive Garden is that Italian food has really only existed in most of America (i.e. outside of NYC, Chicago, and other large cities with a large Italian population) since 1950 or so, and for a while, most of that was pizza. "Macaroni" and various pastas were an unusual food for people in my grandmother's generation to know how to cook. In flyover country, when an Olive Garden opened in the 90s, that was the closest they'd ever come to enjoying the true flavors of the Italian countryside. No joke.
People today take for granted the rich and diverse restaurant culture we have today, but a lot of North America was diners, steakhouses, supper clubs, lunch counters, and other "American" style food, with very occasional Chinese or Italian, as recently as the 1970s.