This. Belief in linear scaling of recipes is such a quick tell for someone who hasn't done even the most basic home cooking (or someone who has no sense of taste / texture at all).
Cooking is stacking exponents with whole range of parameters, so linear scaling indeed happens only sometimes, if you squint hard :). Unfortunately, the error bars on everything are huge - purity and quantity of ingredients, accuracy of measuring devices, accuracy and reliability of equipment, and people's care about the process - they're all so bad that cooking simply cannot be anything better than an art.
(The non-art variant is called process engineering.)
But yeah, it is the messiness and art of it that keeps it fun for me (especially after a day of math and coding)!