That's a pretty apt analogy, really. If you just want to be a line cook at a no name franchise, then by all means, blindly follow recipes. If you want to understand what you're actually doing and have the ability to create new stuff without using a cookie-cutter template, yeah, you're going to need to go deeper.

As a uni student, I had some degree of disdain about being taught from first principles when I really just wanted to build games and apps, but the further I get in my career, the more I appreciate this groundwork. Recipes and frameworks come and go. Theory and first principles are timeless.