hRecipe is over 10 years old, and the point of microformats is to extract semantic data from HTML. It's not really solving the same problem as CookLang in the way HTML and JSON aren't solving the same thing.

While I don't know much about the history of Recipe in Schema, I find "covers way more than it reasonably should" to be an odd criticism of a format. I usually find it to be a mark of schema maturity. All concepts behind data formats have more complexity than an initial investigation would uncover (see also: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names[1]). If anything, it leads me to believe CookLang has a ways to go.

1: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...