Tips for surviving dinner time

Dinner time is rough for our family (4yo twins and 2yo). We both work right up until child care pickup time. Once we get the kids home, my husband cooks while I engage the 3 kids, which usually feels like the worst balancing act as they’re all demanding my attention at the same time. Even if i have an activity prepared, someone doesn’t want to do it and I’m responding to requests/demands from all 3. My husband has always been the cook in our relationship as he (used to) enjoy it - pre-kid he would make elaborate dinners, he has simplified very significantly, but it still takes 45 minutes and the meal usually isn’t simple (today was some kind of pasta with sauce, spinach, onions and sausage) - he wants it to taste good and only wants to cook one meal. Things aren’t better on the occasion that i cook something because i find cooking with kids around stressful.

Then, dinner is ready and we immediately are barraged with requests for the kids on what they want, even with trying to make some things like getting their own water and forks self serve. The 2 year old generally starts screaming and refusing to eat if it’s anything but bread, grapes or mac and cheese. The twins are being silly, which escalates into chaos as they’re very loud or playing with their food and straws, making a mess - which causes us to state boundaries (use your fork), get ignored, and eventually yell at them. Then the twins often criticism the food - today it was that the spinach was yucky, we tell them if they don’t like it they can eat around it but it’s unkind to say things like that, but comments, interspersed with loud chaos continues — and those type of comments really bother both husband and I. The toddler keeps screaming, we try distraction and silliness to get him to eat some and eventually give up, and let him out to go play. he often comes and wants me to play with him, but i haven’t even started my dinner. The twins see toddler playing and decide they want to go play too, whereas if they stayed at the table they probably would just eat more. often the chaos or ignoring our reasonable requests/boundaries (don’t drop your food on the ground, lower your voice), leads to a timeout, which involves looks of crying and puts us all on edge, and a kid coming back from a timeout never eats more food. if they don’t eat enough the fairly soon afterwards are asking for a snack, and then we have to constantly refuse that for the rest of the night (we offer that they can eat the dinner that’s left, very rarely works) while I worry whether they’re hungry. At the end of dinner, we are both exhausted and ready for bedtime.

what are we doing wrong? Any tips? I see the idea of putting one “safe food” on the plate- there always are things they like just maybe in a different combination. and if we put grapes on the plate, the toddler would only eat those and then loudly insist on more grapes and have a meltdown. We’ve tried letting the meltdowns happen, acknowledging the feeling and holding the boundary - but the same thing just happens most nights, and it wears us out and doesn’t seem effective.