> What's "high heat" exactly?
A suggestion that you want caramelization and/or browning
> What is a "pinch" of salt, and how does it differ from a "dash" of it?
Doesn't matter, you should salt to taste anyhow, this is merely a reminder to do so
> When it says "sprinkle some X" how much should you sprinkle?
Smell it or taste a little and guess
> How much oil is in a "drizzle"?
Enough to tell that it's there, not enough to soak it through
> How many grams is a "medium potato"? Or an onion?
Doesn't matter, you'll wind up with a range of vegetable quantities and they all roughly work, just end up in slightly different places.
No! It is not a creative[0] process! I am attempting to make food, to eat, not a bloody painting, and pretentions of artistry are, as ryandrake just said, infuriating[1].
0: I assume you mean "involving creativity", not "that has the effect of creating something", since the latter applies equally well to, for example, working in a assembly line.
Edit: 1: case in point, apparently.
Boiling may need a bit of experimentation to get right for some foods, but in general you need to have a pot big enough to take the full amnount of food, a sufficient quantity of clean, potable water to fill the pot until it's two cm over the food once the food is in the pot, and a sufficiently powerful source of heat to bring the water and the food to a temperarture of 100 degrees Celsius within a period of time of no more than 10 minutes. Once you have those things, the pot, the water, and the source of heat, put the food in the pot, add water to fill the pot to two cm over the food, put the pot on the heat source and turn the heat source on. At this point it would probably be useful to have a thermometer so you can directly measure the temperature of the water, but you can usually observe that the water in the pot is vaporising and confirm that it is at boiling point. Leave the food to cook until all the water in the pot has evaporated, but not more than that or the food will burn. Then eat the food. Remember to turn the heat source off before eating! You may also want to consult a set of instructions concerning how to clean the pot once it's used.
There may be variations of the procedure, for example if you have a very big amount of food you may want to adjust the levels of water, but that is something you can experiment with. In any case, if you can master this technique (but don't be discouraged if you can't) then you will always have a way to make food to eat that is, indeed, not a bloody painting.
Like, making a peanut butter sandwich has this factor - different people like different breads and peanut butters in different amounts, so it's up to you to pick something and make it a food. The underspecified quantities and characteristics in a hypothetical peanut butter sandwich "recipe" are just a hint that you have wide latitude to make choices.
I agree that seems much more reasonable, but the vagueness doesn't help here: I can't personalize something if I can't even reliably reproduce it in the first place.
> a hypothetical peanut butter sandwich "recipe"
That's kind of the point - there is no peanut butter sandwich recipe, because you don't need a recipe to make one. If something is fiddly enough to need a recipe, you need the recipe to be at least precise enough that you can actually get the fiddly parts right, and any 'problems' stemming from excess precision can be obviated by an * or ±8grams.
*: increase this to make it fluffier, decrease for chewier.
What kind of bread? (Whole wheat, sourdough, white, shokupan, raisin, olive, berry) Presliced or do you cut your own slices and select your own the thickness? Toasted, fresh, or days old bread? Then you have your peanut butter. Chunky, smooth, really chunky? Pure peanut butter or is a swipe of almond butter good. And do you use jam, jelly, preserves, marmalade? What kind of fruit? Or do you prefer fresh fruit, maybe with some honey on top?
There are many options, if you want to reliably reproduce a dish you need to cook a lot and track what you cook in detail. A home cook likely doesn't have the opportunity to get to the point where they can crank out a number of dishes repeatably the way someone in a restaurant can. The scales are just wrong.
For my friend, they decided to record exactly what they did while cooking for a while. To me it seemed crazy detailed, I cook by smell and taste and feel. For them it was confirmation they'd rather pay for or otherwise eat food prepared for them.
Now, in one of those cases, you probably have sufficient experience that the lack of exact roadmap doesn't faze you. And apparently in the other, it does.
There are more detailed and less "leave this out" recipes there. I don't, genuinely, know where to find them, but that's what I used to use when I learned to cook. It MAY be worth investigating recipe collections designed for home ec classes, as presumably they are designed for the less experienced food maker.
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.
If you really want to know, "officially" a pinch of salt is ~0.35g and a dash is ~0.7g. Accurately measuring quantities that small is a trained skill using specialized equipment. Anything you can buy on Amazon for under $1,000 would get you +-100mg when used correctly at best - used in a kitchen with a 50g measuring spoon for 0.5g of salt you'd be lucky to get +- 1000 mg.