I strongly agree with this. I consider myself a fairly accomplished cook, I've been cooking since I was tall enough to see over the table, but one of the big things that helps is that I will take the time to find the right recipe, mostly by looking at the recipe itself and being able to visualize and taste the food before I make it, but also but reading what the author writes and deciding if I trust them.
It depends on your skill level / experience. Some people have a knack for cooking and just need a rough list of ingredients to figure out a dish.
Some people need detailed instructions and rely more on recipes. I don't have any idea how to season things apart from a liberal use of buillon cubes, so my best dishes are when I closely follow recipe instructions from good cookbooks.
Check out Salt Fat Acid Heat [0] if you haven’t seen it. It totally changed my idea of how to season things, to the point that I feel a lot more confident modifying existing recipes now.
One of the most eye opening things also sounds the most silly in retrospect: taste as you go. It makes such a huge difference! For whatever reason, I would always blindly follow a recipe until the very end, and hope that the “big reveal” turned out how I hoped. Now, I try to taste as I go (add a little salt; try it; add more). A related tip that blew my mind recently: if you’re making meatballs and want to check the seasoning, cook a tiny chunk of it and taste it before committing to a whole batch.
Anyway, I really like that book :D
0: https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering/dp/14767...
And more importantly, lots of people really _think_ they fall into a category where they don't need recipes to "cook well". In reality, they started off following shitty recipes, and so now their "expertise" is built on shoddy foundations.
That said, we are in the minority. Most people just Google the recipe they want to make and use the first result. This very very very rarely produces a good result. Most people don't care. And yet they wonder why their food sucks.
There's definitely some skill to cooking, but 80% of why I'm considering a good cook among my friends is because I only use recipes from people I trust, and I try to follow them as closely as possible.