Nobody is born with "kitchen skills" whatever that means. You have to spend some time learning it, and everybody can do that. Trying to explain chopping onions as "kitchen skills" is just running away from the challenge.
Jumping to conclusions about what "kitchen skills" means aside, the fact that nobody is born with them is precisely the point. Congratulations, you understood it!
Slightly less facetiously, "anyone can follow a recipe" makes about as much sense as "anyone can follow a README". Is it some arcane black magic that only a select few can decipher? No, but at the same time if you don't recognise that there is a baseline level of technical literacy needed to actually follow your average README then you might have your head stuck too far in a bubble.
Following a readme on a github project is obviously a very technical skill and conflating it with following a cooking recipe where the complexity level is around "chop onions" is a strawman, I haven't claimed such.
Cooking is very much a technical skill, much more so than following a readme to install and set up some end-user-targeting project or other. I've seen too many flat-out horrendous meals from people who self-describe as "knowing how to cook" to be convinced otherwise.
Have you looked at a typical recipe recently? Here's an example (https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/oriental-egg-fried-rice) from the "quick and easy" section of BBC Good Food, a site that's regularly in the first page of search results for various recipes. Never mind that it expects you to have procured cooked chicken breasts from somewhere (and oh boy are those easy to turn into a bland, dry, rubbery mess if you don't know what you're doing)...do you honestly think there is no room in those instructions for someone who does not already know how to cook to screw it up?
Here's a recipe (https://urbanfarmie.com/instant-pot-jollof/) for a more complex dish that I am intimately familiar with, which is how I can tell you for absolutely free that if you just "follow the recipe" as described you will very easily end up with a soggy mess at best and burnt rice at worst.
Or - since you seem to like patting yourself on the back about onions - the next time you're following a recipe and it tells you to "sweat" or to "caramelise" onions or "sauté until golden", maybe spare a thought for how likely it is that someone who is actually new to the kitchen will get the correct result.
Cooking is so easy, everyone who has hands, can read a book and a clock can do it. Start with eggs or pancakes, work your way up from there.
My kids learned to cook from age 9. Now everyone can cook in this household.
I can’t take any adult who says it’s hard seriously, especially since I grew up in a culture where I heard a myriad of excuses from ‘manly man’ who think of it as a woman’s job.
