I definitely got the scene - I just didn't like it. Perhaps it would have hit harder if I was in the US, but I'm not so sure. Modern society is quite comparable in most places these days and everything you described pretty much goes on here too. I think others commented too at the time that it felt like Lynch chastising viewers to slow down and stop demanding answers. It felt very meta but not in a good way, in a very on-the-nose fashion.
I don't really mind the shootout at the diner (though I'm on the fence whether it felt a bit silly or not), or even the screaming lady herself, but then the puking kid and it just all ... ugh. It was just one of those moments for me where the original Twin Peaks felt very far in the rearview mirror indeed. Depressingly so - but not in the way they intended it to be depressing.
It didn't even feel like the town. I know that was part of the point (progress marches on, the issues got worse) but I felt like a lot of that stuff (the town being overrun with drugs and crime) while true to life felt very heavy-handed and just grotesque to me. Sure, the original series had the town rife with drugs and prostitution and murder, but somehow it was handled better and still kept a magical or mystical element to the town, which I think made the hard stuff hit harder. Here all of that was missing. Perhaps it would have been better had Coop just emerged from the red room into Glastonbury Grove and gone straight to TP after all. Perhaps have Andy (in place of Harry) still go out to that log periodically and sit there keeping watch. I feel like we got a brief glimpse of that kind of mystical wonder with Hawk seeing the red curtains in the woods and some of the Log Lady's scenes, but not nearly enough.
The diner scene, though, just felt like ... I'm not even sure, borderline parody? I don't think the scene itself was slow, not really, I just included it as I felt it was referencing the overall slower pace of the series. You know, it's an okay scene but it's a bit silly to me. If you cut out the puking kid and the woman's over the top reaction to it, it sits better with me. But I still didn't like it. I mean, I don't hate it. I don't even think it's bad. It just didn't work for me for a lot of reasons.
I was reading on the first page of the General S3 Discussion thread (
http://www.dugpa.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=3635) I had listed all the things I liked and didn't like about the series back in 2017 and both lists are surprisingly of comparable lengths so I guess I really am 50/50 on the whole thing. Maybe if it had been cut in half I would have loved it more (but depends what ended up in the half we'd get lol!). I was thinking earlier, it's one of those things, I really have to extract the stuff I love from and just put up with the rest. I think The Return is very much love it/hate it or like some of it/dislike some of it more than most other things I've watched. The original had so much I just loved, I didn't have to wade through much stuff I didn't to pick out the bits I loved apart from in the middle stretch. So I suppose the middle stretch of Season 2 is very comparable to The Return for me (ironic given how much Lynch apparently hated S2 but also fitting in that I felt a lot of the humour in The Return was comparable to that middle stretch).
I will say, though, the strong stuff in The Return is much much stronger than any of the good nuggets in S2's middle stretch. There are flashes of utter brilliance. I just think it would have been a much stronger revival had it cut the fluff. And, you know, while it's great that so many people love The Return and I'm completely on board with people who do (I wish I did more), it is interesting to me that, of all Lynch's works, EVEN "Inland Empire", it is really the only recent one with no known deleted scenes/footage. So I think, even if people like it's length, it should be worth noting that he definitely threw every bit of footage (for the most part) into it and imo it shows. I think he also expanded the script from what he and Frost originally handed in? That shows too - most of the roadhouse scenes for example. The comparisons to IE and its deleted footage, BV and its deleted footage, and especially TP and The Missing Pieces is very strong to me - but in this case, it feels like they were combined and then some.