I have literally never met anyone express (2). Any time anyone needs a recipe site they immediately start complaining about it, unprompted.
It helps she writes well and it seems to genuinely reflect the author's life--I think it started out as a personal blog with occasional recipes before becoming a recipe site with bloggy bits bolted on. The text is also fairly helpful, in that it sometimes describes less successful attempts cooking the same thing, or compares it with other dishes ("If you hate X, try [this] instead").
This may be a rare exception though--I agree that a lot of other recipe sites have tons of vacuous filler.
The format of Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz's blog have remained unchanged for about 15 years, probably because those authors used the success of their blogs to establish related revenue streams (mostly via bestselling cookbooks). I would be surprised if the blogs themselves still make much money, given how few display ads are included on each page.
But for some random blog that I find while googling? Never.