This is definitely true. Hence why you should ALWAYS be tasting your food as you are cooking it...not just at the end, but during the process, adjusting your seasonings. Again, Harold McGee does a better job than I, but the points at which one adds, say, salt to a dish, actually make a difference in the outcome of the final flavor.
And remember: you can always add more flavor, but you can never take away when cooking. That's another good rule of thumb.
So a lot of us here are tech inclined and, I think, startup inclined. Think of cooking and learning to cook this way: it is an experiment. You are learning. The fastest way to learn is to talk with people who have done it before (follow the recipe). If you're smart and want to learn really fast, each time you make a recipe, you'll make little notes to yourself about what you learned or noticed about the different ingredients. Then, next time you make the dish, you can tweak it (pivot your idea). If it works, you've learned something that will probably stick with you for a long time.
