Yes, I know "long stories about last year's vacation where we ate such and such" get a lot of universal, justifiable hate. Everyone detests scrolling through "recipes" laden with ads and useless copy and photos.
But, to me, these kinds of database sites lose two important elements: the source of the recipe, and useful comments, from both the author and the readers.
Perhaps it's because I cook a lot, but I can't imagine just Googling "pasta carbonara" and following the first hit (pretending it was nicely formatted without ads). 90% of recipes online are seriously mediocre. For me, either I already know and trust the author (Serious Eats, many New York Times authors, etc), or I need to do a bit of work to decide whether they are the real deal.
(As an aside, I think that this is the source of the long-winded stories. Back in the day, when it wasn't so bad, I followed a handful of recipe bloggers and got to know and trust their recipes through their blogs. It seems so crap now because (1) they've so much longer, and (2) when we land on the top search of someone we don't know, it just seems like useless noise.)
For the second point, if you look at, say, a New York Times recipe, there's usually one, maybe two paragraphs of context about the dish itself (not stories of vacations). It's useful stuff. It tells you what you can substitute, it tells you the way this is and isn't authentic, it gives you hints on the tricky parts. And then the comments at the bottom will do all that and more, pointing out the recipe's flaws and improvements.
Where a database can come in useful for me is after I've fully vetted and digested the recipe, I'll add it to my own. But using a database to find a recipe has never been interesting to me, personally.