"Desirable result" isn't particularly well-defined due to the variability of personal taste. Like, one useful skill for a home cook is to read a recipe and think something along the lines of "I think I'd like that more if it had more garlic".
What I get from this whole discussion is that I would love a recipe book with measures in weights, temperatures specified such that you can use an IR thermometer, and a set of questions at the end of the recipe for assessing how I think the flavour could be improved.
I think what you should take away from this is that cooking is a skill that requires you to assess what is going on, and adjust as you go. There are too many variables for any sort of “exact” weights or temperatures. Baking can be exact because almost all your main ingredients are totally uniform (water, flour, salt, sugar, butter, milk, yeast) and even then, there is often a requirement for variability to account for things as basic as the water absorption rate for your flour. But with cooking, you are using primarily whole ingredients that are nothing but variable. It would be like trying to read a book about how to shoot a basketball. No amount of detail about newtons of force or velocity is going to help, but descriptions about how it should feel and how to stand will, and at the end of the day, you have to practice the technique and learn and improve by looking at your end state.
Most recipe books are not going to teach you how to cook in the way blueprints aren’t going to teach you how to build a house. Youtube videos that teach you techniques are going to be the fastest way, as you can see and hear what is happening with the meal as they describe what they are trying to do and hopefully why they are doing it.
