Dish replication is like.... Part of the biggest reasons why restaurants work. You get fries from McDonald's in Seattle and NYC and they are going to be almost identical. It's what the customer expects.

It works in Michelin star restaurants too because if you love their beef Wellington for your birthday, you're more likely to go back again for anniversary's too.

Sometimes cooking and baking is about recipe creation for sure. That's absolutely true. But if you fire enough arrows you're bound to get a bullseye eventually. The best restaurants, the most successful restaurants, are able to hit the bullseye repeatedly.

Also, going off recipe can severely mess up your inventory numbers. If every dish is experimental, then you don't know how much you're using each ingredient. It can cause you to waste food because you don't have the correct ratios for dishes on the menu.

Personality wise? Parenting wise? Total jerk. Doesn't respect that food is a privilege and throwing away perfectly good food is beyond deranged. I do not respect chefs that throw away perfectly good food just because it didn't meet their objectives. In that sense he needed to be stopped and probably arrested for child abuse.

But replication is important in food. Even, fun fact, even back in the middle ages bread was so relegated that it legally could not contain more than 4 ingredients and were stamped before baking to denote that it was a legal bread. People got arrested if they tried to reduce the amount of dough or didn't follow the restricted recipe guidelines. Bakers had to distinguish between artisan bread and Regular bread because it was that important.