Are you sure about the author’s intent? Unless you know the writer very, very well, I think it’s impossible to tell from written text.

You make an excellent point. I shouldn't have been sure about the author's intent.

Thank you for pointing out my error.

Exactly, you don't need to know how molecules act under the hood to be productive cooking.

Until you need to substitute ingredients, you use a different type or rangetop, the pan metal or thickness is different, or something else changes. This was a perfect analogy. People can follow the recipe of assemling various frameworks and toolkits to create software, but they will eventually encounter difficulty.

You may not need to understand molecular differences, but knowing hows fats, proteins, and carbs work, along with how to substitute ingredients, and different theories of cooking all help to actually understand why you can cook until mysteriously things don't work the same as yesterday.