Hard, hard disagree here. Learn some recipes, enjoy eating some food that you've cooked for yourself. Cook some recipes you like for 6 months and _then_ start learning the techniques and fundamentals.
Recipes are always written at a particular level of abstraction. Most won't tell you how to dice an onion, but many will tell you explicitly how to make a roux, without saying the word roux. Learning the basics means you can skim and assimilate recipes at a much higher level. Plenty of people can follow recipes but few can learn a recipe from first principles as there are far too many details. To learn a recipe you need to first learn the basics, then you find a recipe is rather easy to learn. Then once you can do that you have the power to tweak them or substitute ingredients etc. as necessary and/or desired.
A simple statement of ingredients, processing, times, temperatures, etc., should get you something serviceable. But a guide which tells you what each ingredient, step, etc., is doing to the finished product is far more informative. Also those which let you know whether a value is a minimum or maximum, and how much flexibility there is to it. Much the same as a step-by-step systems admin guide works if everything goes right, but is entirely useless if you run up against a problem, in which case what you desperately need is troubleshooting and compensation/correction guidance.
For example, if a sourdough bread-making recipe gives an instruction "autolyse for 30 minutes", is there any indication that going shorter or longer is possible, or even preferable? (In practice you can autolyse for hours if you choose to do so, 20--40 minutes is a minimum.) How sensitive is dough to overfermentation? What will more, or less, salt do? How does starter change its behaviour in warmer or cooler conditions? What's too warm? Is there such a thing as too cold? How should you adjust hydration for different doughs (whole wheat, rye, spelt, einkorn, semolina, etc. --- something I'm still learning FWIW, though generally WW more, rye less, spelt about the same). How does dough change with a longer cold ferment (1 day vs. 2, 3, or more)?
A recipe is is a sequence with no flow or feedback logic to it. Techniques give you tools to control the process.
Learning a recipe doesn't give you much in terms of cooking-skills. But with skills, you can create or adapt any recipe to your own demand.