Perhaps it's one of those things about Japanese society that you have to accept the bad to get the benefit of the good.

Perhaps because they have these kinds of policies and beliefs, they're able to offer a very high degree of service and dedication to quality, so that you enjoy it when you do get to go with a regular patron.

Maybe if they did have to take everyone who appears at their door, they would need to dumb down or decrease the quality of what they do because random strangers might judge them in the wrong way or post negative reviews and they'd have to modify their food/service to suit those incentives. And you wouldn't be coming across a small izakaya that you really want to go try, because it no longer exists.

Maybe, I don't know. But I've learned that Japanese culture has a lot of these subtle societal byproducts, where the good things you love about the country kind of need other less good things in order to be possible. You get the benefit of seeing the some of the best of it, without having to deal with the downsides of living in that society in the long term. But also, you don't get some of the benefits that also accrue only from living there your whole life.