For me the recipe sites are pretty usable (with adblock), there is generally a "jump to recipe" button to skip past the text. And sometimes I even read the text, if it is a good recipe the text often has useful information like substitutions and preparation techniques. Certainly a "just the recipe" website format would be worse SEO-wise, but I am not so sure it would be more useful.

They could split it in multiple pages instead of a single page! Imagine having to click “next part” >10 times just to see if you eventually end up with a section that contains the actual recipe

And unskippable ads after every third image. Then the moment you get to the final image there’s an email registration wall. It has a little X button that doesn’t work on iOS.

I see that we have a connoisseur of the devil’s work here :)

The thing is, there's a limit to how many times the typical user would do that before just clicking back to google for a different recipe.

They also break the back button.

That's why I open search results in a new tab, and close the tab to go back to the search.

Me too, but I still hate it when they break the back button.

Create a fake google page, inject it into their history, the users goes back, sees something google like, now you’re 100% evil, congrats! :)

Almost all of them now have a "jump to recipe" link at the top of the page.

Sites that have a poor user experience by design create the ranking signals for their own demotion by such design. Get a lot of traffic from search with not many people liking the destination page and that ranking will quickly go away.