Anecdotal, but I've encountered a number of places where it's more or less required.
- Restaurants: Menu is QR only. In one case, ordering food was QR only.
- Queueing up at my local Costco optical department requires scanning a QR code.
- Various other check-ins for various other government agencies and businesses.
- Urgent care check-in paperwork requiring QR code. No paper, and typing the loooong URL in manually is horrific.
Have you tried saying “my phone is broken”? I doubt it’s as stringent as you think.
I have never had an issue and I don’t carry a smartphone. Usually they just hand you a paper menu or a tablet depending on what you’re doing.
I've seen restaurants that required a QR code to get a menu. I simply walked out. Lots of other places to eat exist with more reasonable practices.
Forcing people to scan a QR code to see a price is a great way to use the data from their device to serve them a different price than the last person who scanned that code was asked to pay.
Anyone else who wants you to scan a QR code as part of a check in process can be told you don't have a phone or that it doesn't work. It's their job to figure that out.