Yes, and I’m explaining that a significant part of being an experienced cook is just the understanding that cooking isn’t precise. You do not need to work out what sized teaspoons the author was using, just get any of the teaspoons out of your drawer, fill it up, mix it in, and then taste to see if it seems ok. The final result will depend on factors you can’t control for - the conditions ingredients were grown in, the age of spices when they were ground, the specific cultivar you’re using - and the author doesn’t have your personal tastes, so while they can tell you the ingredients to use they can’t give you the precise amounts that you’ll enjoy. To find that out you need to make the dish repeatedly with small adjustments until you hone in on your tastes.

Thinking back on being a beginner, my problem wasn’t that instructions were imprecise, but more that I didn’t interpret “to taste” as a real instruction. It means I should fucking taste my food as I go, when at the time I would just taste it at the end.

So many bad meals can be avoided by sampling them over time and adjusting. I should know, having made too many.

I would classify this as an example of cooking logic (my own phrase) that needs to be learned. A lot of good recipes will assume the cook understands fundamental concepts like this, but it’s not necessarily the recipe’s job to teach you. Same as how IKEA assembly instructions might seem cryptic at first, but really boil down to using 3-4 different techniques to screw wood panels together. I do think there’s a general lack of awareness that cooking has a separate logic, and this means a lot of people never teach it to others.