I think, in re: failure points for cozy fiction, one of the things your post makes me think about is that cozy SFF fails when it *artificially* lowers the stakes by hand-waving real problems, or reducing their importance. Like, "Of course running a coffee shop is easy" makes the story low-stakes by ignoring the reality of actual business ownership!

I think you are also making a point about how some cozy SFF wants to have it both ways? Assert that labour is important, but also minimize the *labour* part of labour? A sort aesthetic marxism?