Counterpoint: you don't watch Julia Child (or any cooking personality) to get "edible". Her whole shtick was this is what real French cooking is so listen up. That's the appeal. You're watching to learn how to produce a particular product. "Do it this way. Or just don't. Whatever, it's still food" just doesn't jive with the raw purpose of the thing. If we're talking at a bar and I'm railing you about your omelet technique, then yeah, that's bullshit, but of course that's how it is in cooking shows. Jacques Pépin is distinctly not that way in the above video though: here's two styles, one is not better than the other. Here's how you make each. But also, implicitly: each one is different, and if you respect the craft you can distinguish them and make each one on purpose.
French cooking is that which can be condoned in reference to any book written by Escoffier. That's all it is, nothing else. If you stray too far from one of his seminal texts than it isn't classical French cuisine. There is nothing else to it. I find Escoffier hilariously pompous and impractical. I don't have the three days it would take for me to properly make one of his recipes. I don't have the moral fortitude to correctly make sttock his way.
We could talk about "other foodies" and say anything we want, but I don't see what your seeing in the provided fodder. I'd also challenge your assumption that these elaborate rituals are valueless for the end product. You're looking for an empirical breakdown, but lots of chefs just don't work that way and don't need to. Or rather, what you call a ritual is what takes the place of empirical knowledge that enables them to make a recipe consistently well. It's not necessarily a purity of the art thing. Most people have an auntie that never measures anything but makes a consistently amazing Meat Pie or some other thing, and the only way she could convey the recipe to you is "watch and do exactly as I do". Ignoring the ritual in that case is like those morons on recipe sites that comment: "I substituted tofu for ham. Terrible recipe. One star".
That is not at all accurate. Julia Child rose to prominence as a counterpoint to the proliferation of TV dinners. WWII basically created an entire culture and an entire ecosystem of frozen and prepacked food; the rise of the supermarket coincided with the downfall of fresh ingredients and local specialists. Julia Child's "whole schtick" was that you could take ingredients and make food without having to mix carrots and jello. More than that, early food network started with Sarah Moulton, who started out as one of Julia Child's assistants. Except eggs. In foodieism, cooking with eggs is a "whatever it's still food" task. But cooking eggs is fucking fundamentalist.Counterpoint: you don't watch Julia Child (or any cooking personality) to get "edible".