There's two sides to that.

On one hand, you're right- someone who is motivated to learn can easily pick up cooking.

On the other hand, it's not just 'follow a recipe'. There's a lot of sub skills that someone who CAN cook can easily take for granted.

Let's say your recipe calls for one chopped onion. So the prospective cook goes to the grocery store... but there's lots of onions. There's white and yellow and sweet and there's little ones and big ones. Which one to get?
And then you have to chop it. Do you peel it first? How much to peel? Discard the ends or center or use them? What's the best way to chop it? How big of pieces do you want to end up with?

None of these are DIFFICULT things to find or learn. But 'follow a recipe' isn't just a one step operation for a newbie cook, there's a lot of other stuff that has to be learned along the way.

In that regard we do our kids (pretty much all of them) a disservice- our schools teach kids that learning is a boring and unpleasant activity that involves hard mental work with little practical reward and thus should be avoided when possible. And we grade their efforts- failures are punished as disgraces, not treated as opportunities to learn. So I don't entirely blame the dude who grows up out of that and doesn't feel super motivated to dive into something new.

I also blame schools for not teaching basic cooking and financial literacy to kids. I was given a semester or two of 'home economics', the only things I learned in that class were 1. the difference between a spatula and a pancake turner, and 2. that we'd be yelled at if we didn't dry the sink basin (even though it was about to get wet again). That curriculum needs a serious rethink.