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.

Yeah, there’s just more things to understand with baking. Yeast doing biology, acid/base chemistry, plus the whole “do everything at the start and hope you balanced things right because you can’t tweak as you go if it starts getting dry or the flavour balance is off”.

Or maybe I’ve just gotten lucky with my close enough measurements and substitutions so far.