I suspect that the reason most cooks lie is that they're not the ones doing it. To them, cooked onions are an ingredient that a spouse or assistant put in a bowl for them while they were still deciding which homey anecdote to fill out their "recipe" with. Peeling, chopping, and basic preparation are for the little people.
This. There's plenty of people backing this up.
This is backwards. It's really the other way around here.
What you have is real-world cooks and chefs, with all their collective experience, giving recipes correctly, but using the word "caramelized," and a bunch of people telling them that that isn't technically what "caramelized" means.
The vast majority of recipes involve cooking onions for 10-20 minutes, not caramelizing them for 45.
The "mistake" in all these thousands of recipes is simply the word, not that none of these people know how to cook, or are deliberately lying to you about how to caramelize am onion.
Often, but that’s not what is happening here. Here you have real world cooks and the collective experience of them telling recipe writers that you can’t caramelise onions in 5-10 minutes.
In your own video examples, the onions aren’t caramelised, they aren’t even cooked. You can tell because you can still see the green/white colour of the onions.
This is what they should look like: http://rachel-cuisine.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/ob_598de...
What you’ve made is halfcooked onions that have been fried in butter and sugar. Which may taste perfectly fine, but also nothing like the real thing.