Honestly this fear is overblown. Unless you’re making pastries, baking is relatively straightforward and forgiving. Breads, cakes and pies ove you and want you to have fun. Experimenting with vegan substitutions, gluten free baking and scaling batch sizes helped me feel much less intimidated by recipes, you learn what role the ingredients are playing and how to adjust if you add too much, too little, or too not the right thing.
Baking is pretty forgiving, so many old baking recipes are written with add flour until it looks right as part of the recipe. If your baking sucks it’s most likely super old ingredients or you did something stupid like substitute strawberries for butter.
Wait, so I shouldn’t be greasing my pans with strawberries?
Brownies are forgiving. Sourdough bread will smack you in the face if you talk smart.