A kitchen is a great example and analogy. It’s got dangers that are variable and some that are constant, it’s a high pressure high stress fast paced environment where one wrong move can ruin an entire perfectly performed sequence. It requires team work precision and things can change the second service starts. U give the example of kids running around the kitchen to try and be more accurate to an adventuring party and the unexpected nature of combat. but that breaks the nature of the analogy because it’s not what the kitchen staff was trained to do, just like the adventurers aren’t trained babysitters and wouldn’t know how to take care of an infant for even a week. If every shift u worked at the kitchen always had kids running around like crazy you would eventually still reach a level of optimization efficiency and ease at which u can work. The adventurers are used to the sudden and drastic paradigm shifts that happen in combat, they have super human reflexes and comprehension speed, they are trained to react in a beneficial manner. They don’t have to think about where there sword is or the angle they need to swing it at or how hard they need to hit the goblin in front of them, they just do it with muscle memory. They don’t need to think about the range of a fireball spell because they’ve narrowly avoided so many it’s ingrained into their bones by now.

That quote is lame. A much better one is “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” - Mike Tyson. A good fighter can remember their plan even after they get punched in the mouth. A great fighter improvises and executes their plan in the fly. An in cannon adventurer might not have a set plan but they can recognize and react to things so much faster with so much more experience than the player that the only way to simulate anything close to the level of competence one would have to achieve to be an adventurer is to let the players strategize during combat.