I think you touched on a good point, cooking is often a generational skill, for different reasons - you were poor so your meals were cheap and made at home - you were poor so your parents worked too much and never had time or money for “real” food - you come from a single parent household and cooking for multiple people is too much to do daily as the sole bread winner. Or the other side of the coin, your family was wealthy enough so you never leaned life skills. I guess my point is there’s a lot of lifestyles that would require you to learn to cook, to some degree but not in a dedicated way taught by a competent home cook and a variety of techniques. I started cooking for myself when I was probably 10 because my mom decided she didn’t want to do it anymore and I was plenty competent at making poverty meals but I didn’t really learn “how to cook” until well into adulthood when I was the mom; I used a steak knife for everything, all prep work, until I was like 30, for example. Learning to cook well makes cooking a lot more enjoyable and delicious and it’s just not a skill that is being passed on because most of us are too over worked to do it and that’s been true for a few generations now.