You and your co-worker both just happened to fly US at very unfortunate times.
They did temporarily provide BOB meals to F pax for a very-short period of time (less than a year) when the airline was in deep financial trouble. Hot meals, with real silverware on china returned once the merger with HP occurred and got progressively better every couple of years. Right before the merger, I thought US meals were on par with, if not better than AA meals, in both quality and quantity.
The no-drink policy was only in place for a couple of months as well. IIRC they started charging for soft drinks and water in Fall 2008 and quickly ended the program in February or March 2009.
I'm not sure when your coworker flew US, but IFE was discontinued in Fall 2008 during the height of the GFC. They had planned to launch a new seatback video system (IIRC the system was Lumexis) but for some reason that plan never took off. WiFi was introduced to the A321 fleet in 2010, and was expanded to the rest of the fleet in 2012.
This is true.
I was thinking how much I dislike Amtrak's Flexible Dining (just Google it), but then I realized that when I was Chairman's Preferred on US Airways and got the only upgrade available from LAS-CLT, the meal was some type of cold chicken something in a cardboard box. That was an all-time low on any mode of mass transportation.