There's a huge difference between recipe collections, which are usually just glossy gimmick-y celebrity-endorsed and useless, and actual cookbooks, which teach you how to cook.
A cookbook will have a section on "how to prepare piece of meat X", what to think about when preparing that piece, and then some recipes centered on that piece, at different levels of work and difficulty. That shows you what directions you can take that ingredient in, what it's good for, and how to make variations on the same base ingredient.
Recipe collections never do this, everything is presented as a done deal. Here's the recipe, follow the recipe exactly. There are no connections, no progression, no explanations, no substitutions, and in the end, recipe collections never teach you how to cook.
So I'm not surprised you have issues with recipe collections. They are useless, and I wish more people knew the difference between those and real cookbooks.
A cookbook will have a section on "how to prepare piece of meat X", what to think about when preparing that piece, and then some recipes centered on that piece, at different levels of work and difficulty. That shows you what directions you can take that ingredient in, what it's good for, and how to make variations on the same base ingredient.
Recipe collections never do this, everything is presented as a done deal. Here's the recipe, follow the recipe exactly. There are no connections, no progression, no explanations, no substitutions, and in the end, recipe collections never teach you how to cook.
So I'm not surprised you have issues with recipe collections. They are useless, and I wish more people knew the difference between those and real cookbooks.