The effort involved in doing this is incomparable with the things you just mentioned. This is nothing like baking a cake, more like spending thousands of dollars to build a life-sized Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks.
P.S. Knitting a sweater takes forever too. Especially if it has buttons.
I don't know what could cause somebody to adopt such a twisted notion, but I think the roots of it go deeper than I care to know.