I would agree with this and expand with anecdotes. I am an average cook in the kitchen, usually leaving with all my fingers where they belong, a nice clean kitchen, and a meal that looks and tastes like I meant it to. I have a lot of dishes that are old-hand dishes; if my partner is coming home after a 12 hour day and needs food now, I have a menu of "ready when she's home" meals that are good and I know like the back of my hand. I dance around the kitchen, know how long the grain takes to cook, how long I need for prepping vegetables and spices, etc. this took a bit of practice get to this level of familiarity. Practicing and getting the core skills and ideas down gave me the leisure to experiment, to start tasting in my head what a finished product would be like, or aometimes just having a brute force list if you would of things that go well with ______.
Meals I haven't done before are usually still easy because not every instruction and technique is new; usually it's a matter of "what do I need in what proportion compared to the other stuff?"
This took a lot of cooking for myself to get comfortable with, and a lot of meals that ended up getting fried up with a pasta of some sort and eaten as a "messed that up" meal.
The part where you start to just know how stuff works is when you know you're getting it, jus like any tech or code. You just make it and go and it's not something you have to think or plan about.
A lot of the prep work you're fretting are decisions you will make eventually automatically. They're not that daunting and pretty soon instead of recipes dictating purchases, it will be the other way around; a kitchen full of the essentials you need and then sales or impulses deciding what you make, and the essentials just being tools you need to make it happen.
