Certainly you cannot ever truly abstract away the physics, but also certainly you do not follow instructions, communicate to others, or introspect about how to e.g. cook dinner on the level only of forces.
Many tasks such as "cook an egg" has a well defined physics meaning. If you're trying to:
"Move egg insides into oiled pan on heated surface, move egg shell into trash" it can be purely physics based.
You'll have to find the egg- it's inside the carton inside the fridge behind the milk.
The fridge door, the milk, and the carton are all blocking the desired trajectory of shell and interior.
From a physics perspective you can minimise the energy expenditure required to apply the forces and motions of all objects in the immediate environment to accomplish the objective.
Such as: The door needs to rotate about the hinge, not be ripped out of the way. The milk could be pushed gently to the side rather than removed and set on the counter to expose the carton.
We still haven't programmed proper gripping technique for an egg, but if the chef robot only has a single spatula for a manipulator, a physics based robot would just have to generate teppanyaki techniques and balance the egg on the spatula rather than fail.
I would say that has a physics based answer as well that is made more precise by a non-semantic answer... sliders for amount of mixing and flipping, firmness, temperature of griddle, testing for color change, etc all tie directly into physics or sensors and trying to write a "Sunny Side Up" function first, then writing an "Over Easy" function, and then writing a "Scrambled" function become much easier and more robust when those names map to setting of the physics model.
You've asserted the existence of a physics based answer, but you haven't answered what the "physics-based" criteria of an egg being "cooked" is. I assert that a straightforward short definition does not exist.
