It's worth a try - precision cooking is a way for anyone to have excellent results when cooking. Pretty soon you'll have an immersion circulator, a therma-pen, and a kitchen scale!
There is no precision to the temperature or time control of a dishwasher, and there’s no dry cycle on a sous vide.
Yes it goes without saying it's lacking the precise controls, but it's still the same mechanism of cooking in the end.
A sous vide bath won't replicate any of those steps (except maybe the steaming if you run the bath at practically boiling). Sous vide will cook good salmon but it's not a drop in replacement.
Mine is just a single constant temperature the whole time.
There's certainly no high heat much less sterilization, just bringing the water up to temperature and keeping it there, through pre-wash, wash, and rinse cycles. (Only commercial restaurant dishwashers get up to sterilization temperatures.)
And if the salmon is wrapped airtight, there's no conceptual difference between broiling/steaming/baking. It's all just sous vide, which is none of those. Because it's sealed.
If you wanted to be super pedantic about it, you'd say that none of this is anything like "sous vide" because "sous vide" implies "under a vacuum".
At any rate: dishwasher salmon and sous vide salmon are, literally, the same dish.
Of course the workers would surreptitiously snip a bit of choice meat from the carcass, and drop it in the water to cook. They were not supposed to, but it was difficult to police.
It is possible to sous vide without a vacuum bag in a steam oven, or in certain ovens with temperature probes.
I've cooked 'sous vide' under a running hot tap in a backpacker, which worked great. The water temp happened to be close to perfect (I have a method of measuring temperatures > 40c based on how long I can hold my hand under the running water before pulling out from the pain - surprisingly accurate).
Its about temperature control and efficient thermal transfer; vacuum sealing and using a circulating, temperature controlled water bath are mechanisms of achieving that.
En Papillote and via Dutch Oven are other similar techniques utilizing the same concept. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing?
If you've made the same thing a million times, you probably stopped measuring after the 10th time or so, and if you had arrived at the same exact steps without the tools through trial and error there's literally no difference in the results.
Except for the lunatics writing recipes with imperial volume measurements for dry goods of course.
No bags, humidity control, replaces everything. Immersion circulators, therma-pens, toaster ovens, microwaves, dishwashers - it won't wash your dishes after you make the salmon in it but it will self clean. :)
All that goes on there is an evaporating tray of water and wet bulb temperature sensors (finicky to measure accurately). Imagine an environment similar to a dishwasher or rather, a sauna, where you play not just with the temperature but also the humidity by controlling the steam bath.
The Chinese commercial ones I am referring to use a fill valve with a float (not dissimilar to a toilet tank) to replenish the water from the evaporating tray found at the bottom of the oven. So might get away with an analog circuit.. I digress..
Instead of keeping your food in a plastic bag and recirculating the water through a heating element to keep the temperature you are just constantly boiling water and releasing steam so the entire oven cavity settles at an exact temperature AND humidity level. Hope I didn't bungle that explanation too much.
Anyway GM probably has super fancy home ovens of this nature for $10,000 a premium home gamer version of the sort of thing restaurants/fancy-hotels use. The pros simply front load food trays into them like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cfll7tUcuA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJb9cYXo-4g
The Anova thing is basically a tiny toy version of that.