From a systems perspective, the brown M&Ms are a "canary" (a.k.a. "sentinel indicator"). If a venue can't handle that or simply decides that it's "mega baloney" and ignores it, one can no longer assume that they've done anything competently, or at all.

This. Van Halen has stated as much - if there are brown M&Ms, chances are really high they haven't paid attention to detail, and a deep dive is going to uncover some serious problems:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-did-van-hale...

As an aside, I did think the M&Ms story was just a band being a diva until I heard them explain it like this. It's actually brilliant.

And as somebody who has been on the receiving end of funny riders, a simple message to the talent’s team indicating you saw it but that you don’t plan to carry it out is usually sufficient. All they care about is whether or not you were paying attention.

I am aware of the story and the theory behind it, I just don't agree. There is always something to do, and if you have a tightly run competent group, things go smoothly only because the team has a routine built on experience. If you throw a wrench in that and have someone waste time fiddling with m&Ms it will make the other important things worse. For me, asking for something like that and actually getting it would be more terrifying because it would be an indication that you're dealing with amateurs that don't have a routine and no experience. And also like I said, people pleasers that prioritize satisfying important people's whims instead of providing quality work. It's just been my experience those two don't really mix well, you either strive to be skilled at what you do and progress in your career, or you strive to make someone happy, and progress in your career. Think of the Volkswagen engineer that implemented the exhaust gas test cheating device. I expect qualified people to question nonsense, and to disagree. Skilled people are not McDonald's employees flipping a burger after the instructed 90 seconds or whatever. If you run your organization or team rewarding lemming like behavior, just following along with everything everyone else is doing, you will get a team full of lemmings. There's no way around that. How much you can accomplish with that depends on the task. For McDonald's it's fine, but then again it's a shitty product.

We can of course disagree, there's no harm in that.