Spoken like someone who has never had to actually do these things in real life.

Recipes and formulae do not encode all the minutiae and expertise required to reproduce them. You can tell someone to sear a steak at whatever temperature for however long, but you can't encode the skill and experience required to reproduce in arbitrary conditions. One must learn what a correctly seared steak looks, feels, and tastes like and how to achieve that on uncalibrated cooking equipment.

Your assertion only holds true in a vacuum. If 100% of inputs, materials, environmental conditions are completely standardized and under control then sure, you can follow step by step instructions. The real world does not work that way. No stove on the market is calibrated. Reagents come with impurities. Your skillet may not conduct heat as well as expected or your mains electricity might be low causing your mantle to heat slower and your stir rod to stir slower.

These are things that one has to learn and experience in order to compensate for.