For me the recipe sites are pretty usable (with adblock), there is generally a "jump to recipe" button to skip past the text. And sometimes I even read the text, if it is a good recipe the text often has useful information like substitutions and preparation techniques. Certainly a "just the recipe" website format would be worse SEO-wise, but I am not so sure it would be more useful.
They could split it in multiple pages instead of a single page! Imagine having to click “next part” >10 times just to see if you eventually end up with a section that contains the actual recipe
And unskippable ads after every third image. Then the moment you get to the final image there’s an email registration wall. It has a little X button that doesn’t work on iOS.
Sites that have a poor user experience by design create the ranking signals for their own demotion by such design. Get a lot of traffic from search with not many people liking the destination page and that ranking will quickly go away.
