The 1950s miracle kitchen of the future

How about Monsanto's Plastic "Home of the Future" at Disneyland (1957) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NQ5OlY40bA

It’s interesting to me that most people, even when renovating their kitchen in a home they never intend to sell, don’t bother adjusting the counter heights to that most compatible with the user.

Multiple heights are appearing in more designs now.

I put our counters on motorized standing desk hardware. My wife's ideal height and my own are no where near compatible so now we can just hit our individual preset button.

Plumbing the sink was the trickiest part.

Likely, but not necessarily: take a look at an ICE car: it's mechanical complexity is undoubtedly higher, it also operate normally under more environmental stress and for much longer time, however it's mostly very reliable compared to countless others "appliances" we have.

The issue is the actual social model: we produce goods to sell them, not much to fulfill a purpose, we do buy goods with a use-and-dispose mindset not asking for "investments in $appliance", the whole house is seen as an investments, but it's content normally is considered a kind of commodity nearly no one care about and the result is cheap prices in absolute terms, far expensive in relative terms (for what they are) and overall very low quality. But that's not a tech issue, it's mostly a social issue.

If we start seeing a furnished "houseplace" [1] as an asset not as a commodity things might change. In that case equipment/appliances are not just something I drop there of the shelves of a nearby vendor but something valuable I use, profiting from it, then I ask for reliable and maintainable stuff not for the cheapest because they are all the same crap so better pay less, it's overpriced anyway...

A slow moving sink for instance it's not much an issue: in the past and for decades, at least in Europe we used flexible anyway to connect sink, bidet, etc, those are a rubber tube surrounded by a traced inox "tissue" with flanges on both side, sometimes with a rubber joint sometimes with a built-in PTFE permanent semi-conic joint and rarely something in between. The are the same conceptually of those used in cars and planes for hydraulic (for instance for breaks), very reliable, sometimes more than rigid ones. Also you can achieve the same result with a moving footboard under the sink able even to lift a child or an adult if needed, again it's the same principle of trucks rear hydraulic tailgate, witch is actually very reliable. The issue is the overall cost and so how people value things and how they consider them useful or not.

Think about an hypothetical humans society that instead of investing gazillion of resources to build roads/roads infra (like bridge, tunnels etc) have decide to go for drones-alike flying transports as "we" have discovered the first usable chopper. Now such society might have left old roads to nature, still usable for some purposes but unmaintained not wasting gazillion of oil and crushed rocks with the industry behind to entertain them, gazillion of resources for bridges etc investing in light aluminum-plastic drones able to fly at the same price of an actual real car (we already have them, in tech terms and since a bit of time). City/civil panorama will be much different but in substantial terms much of actual "nightmares" (collapsing bridges, landslides, bad winter treatments on roads, ...) would be substituted by other "nightmares" but with a similar level of sustainability. Again that's in theory is much more a social issue than a tech one: we have developed a certain society around certain tech but that not means it's the only one possible at the same level of comfort and needs. Nor that's the best we can achieve.

The biggest social issue is that most people and élites are with them are reactionary so fear the REAL change preferring a dummy change of anything to not change anything for real. In the end, after decades, something still going through, often in bad ways, just see actual IT compared to historic Xerox vision. Very few want to change such behavior but so far in the history they fails, almost all the time...

[1] I can't find the right term in English, a room equipped for a specif purpose like a workspace...

This sounds a really need idea, I can't really imagine how this would look/work in reality though, especially when you are cooking together