Paying someone else to source and make your food is a luxury. It saves you time, but you're definitely not saving money. Far from it.
Rarely is a financial advisor going to say: "Get your food from restaurants instead of a grocery store"
If you're cooking for a family, you can buy things and consume them quickly, but many things are sold in quantities that are way too much for one or two people, and even leftovers only go so far.
Yes, you can probably make a pot of pasta with a minimal amount of prep time (though "a watched pot never boils" is a saying for a reason), but unless you want to eat pasta for a week that doesn't scale indefinitely. If you want to eat healthy and have a mix of vegetables in your diet, you'll be buying more of them all the time.
Time is a finite resource - for many of us in the tech industry, one of the scarcest. In the best case, I'm working 8-9 hours a day and sleeping 8-9 hours a day, which leaves 6-8 hours of living. If I spend 1-2 hours of those cooking and cleaning dishes, that's a significant chunk of my life.
But you can definitely cook with fresh, healthy ingredients and still be way cheaper than eating out. It takes some planning, but it is minimal planning.
Especially if you make common sense alterations to recipes. Many times, online and cookbook recipes are created for the visual wow factor. There are usually expensive ingredients that are not necessary for the dish.
For example, if the dish calls for a teaspoon of capers or fresh parsley or whatever and you don't already have some, you can generally skip it.
And you can also make larger quantities like what you might make for a family and refrigerate or freeze leftovers. Things last a lot longer in the fridge and freezer than many people think.
As do ingredients like milk and eggs. If you keep your fridge adjusted cold enough, milk generally lasts me more than a month. Yogurt and sour cream more than 2 months, usually. Dryer cheeses basically indefinitely if you cut off any mold before eating.
Lettuce and leafy greens are the shortest shelf life for me, but they can be bought in rather small quantities so I just buy as needed.
I supplement that with flash frozen vegetables like frozen vegetable medley mixes or bags of frozen brussel sprouts that will last about as long as you like if they stay frozen.
I also buy large quantities of high quality meats at Costco and simply portion it up and freeze it. I use a vacuum sealer for best results, but ziploc bags are fine. I recently found a steak that had fallen to the back of the freezer. It had to have been there for at least 18 months. I cooked it up and it was delicious.