It's a bit more complex than just terror bombing out of revenge, though. Technology at the time just couldn't achieve accurate bombing from high flying aircraft under real world conditions. (weather, being shot at, etc.) On top of that, flying bombers in conditions where the achievable precision was higher (e.g. at low level, during daytime) was exceedingly dangerous, and came with high casualty rates. Especially when leaving the bombers unescorted, which is a whole different and highly fascinating story of wrong assumptions ("the bomber always gets through") meeting reality. (fighters exist, and can and will catch up with big, slow, lumbering bombers)

What the USAAF called "daylight precision bombing" really wasn't all that different from the city flattening nighttime raids the British flew, because even in daylight and good weather, the achievable accuracy was severely limited, despite overly optimistic marketing claims by a certain Norden corporation about their bomb sight reliably hitting a pickle barrel from high altitude. At best, high flying bombers with average crews in real world conditions were reliably able to hit roughly the right neighbourhood. Even with pinpoint accuracy, a large bomber formation will spread out the bombs it is dropping over an area at least as wide as the formation itself, unless the bombers break formation for their bomb runs, which was rarely done, not only to limit the risk of collisions or flying into someone else's bombs, but also because the formations served a defensive purpose against fighter attacks, so breaking formation, especially at daytime, was extremely dangerous.

Expert crews with the right training and equipment to pull off actual precision strikes were very limited in numbers (high casualty rates also ensured that not too many crews would live long enough to reach that level of expertise) and therefore only used on important key targets, where accuracy mattered more than usually, or as "pathfinders"/target markers for the regular bomber forces, to give them a better chance of even finding, maybe hitting, and if lucky, even destroying their intended targets.

The main difference between British Bomber Command and the USAAF was their PR. Arthur Harris was brutally honest about hitting entire cities, while the USAAF did sell their large scale raids as surgical strikes on war industry. Another thing adding to the problem was Nazi Germany, of course, not taking a liking and reacting to the bombing by increasingly moving important war industry into underground bunkers, so it was increasingly difficult to hit. The one component of industrial production you can't easily move underground are the places where the workforce lives, so the attacks on entire cities were, at least by some strategic planners, regarded as attacks on the industry, too, by attacking the workforce. On top of that, for some bizarre reason, Arthur Harris, even as head of British Bomber Command, didn't have the security clearance for Ultra, the allied efforts to decrypt secret Axis communications, (most famously the German Enigma) so he didn't have much information on the actual impact of some high risk precision strikes on select key industries, and as a result, often regarded them as not worth the casualties incurred by his crews.