the whole point of the internet is knowledge sharing. the web is the antithesis of knowledge sharing. the web is based around censorship[1] and monetization. you cannot know something as basic as how to caramelize onions because the natural way to spread this info would be to send each other an ebook on cooking or a quote from it, which would be copyright. blame the boomers who made it impossible to trade basic information because of the small downside that some company might lose some sales due to piracy. someone has to explain how to caramelize onions first. you could create an explanation from scratch, but it would be easier to just send a quote from whatever book you remember reading it in.

1. writers on the web who get paid to write know nothing about what they write about (was the same for magazines and such media before the web). they only get paid to get your attention, not to be correct. even when it comes down to being paid to be correct it only means being slightly more correct than the competitor, both of which were nothing near correct in the first place. it's literally a bunch of high school kids writing stuff they did 10 minutes of research on

2. recipe spammers want to make the most impressive recipes so you click them, but nobody will make them if they take actual work.

3. this is the reason why all recipes on the web are mostly garbage and deliver false promises.

3a. even the article in discussion is full of false promises if you enable ads:

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4. this is how magazines for morons worked in the 80s and 90s, the web is just an instantiation of that. it costs money to write and publish something on the web, due to the need to host it on an active server, which costs more as your website becomes more popular, so it makes sense that only money driven "advice" would appear more than anything terribly useful. (yes you can use some free blog site but your content will be removed for legal or "moral" reasons if it's actually useful)

5. the journalist will invoke plausible deniability, or try to weasel themselves back onto the high ground or change the subject when you hassle them on their knowledge / malpractice. as seen in the article: "I emailed Sam Sifton, the Times food critic turned national editor, to ask if the Recipe Writing Guild had some secret agreement to print false estimates of onion-cooking time. He wrote back: “I can reveal that onion caramelization takes longer than the Guild believes. But it need not take as long as you believe it to take! You can speed it up with butter, so long as you are careful not to burn.”"

6. you could just buy or download some good book on cooking, written 300 years ago, but you could not find such a book on the web because any discussion of this on the web is drowned out by corpo spam garbage. every recipe website is just a bunch of new things. you will not learn to cook from them, just to use the latest fad tool or ingredient

this is why stuff like napster and freenet should have become the norm 20 years ago, instead of this boomer dot com garbage. i still remember the day the web came out, it was just like when smart contracts came out - i could not imagine any real use case for it other than some boring commercial garbage like a fake journalist outlet.

1. because it naturally gets structured around large companies (due to the fact that the more readers something has the more money it costs to host) which are held accountable socially and legally for any slight misstep they take, as well as intentionally lying and censoring for their own benefit