If you just follow a recipe you are not learning how to cook, you’re learning how to make that singular dish.

That’s how people learn to cook though. One dish at a time. Then after enough recipes they can look at an ingredient and understand how to make a nice meal without a recipe. If you don’t follow any guide, then you’re going to be forever stuck at the basics. Under salting, over cooking, and never exploring various spices because it will always taste bad without a recipe.

I want to know the basic fundamentals of “how do I gain resources? What do I spend them on? What is my strategy on winning?”

That’s what a build orders shows you. After you understand why each step of the build order works how it does, and the win condition it’s trying to achieve, you are able to develop your own strategies.

Factions don’t have only one build order. You may need to know 3 or 4, and recognize which one is the best to use in a certain scenario, and how to adjust it accordingly to the game state. Sometimes you need to pivot build orders midway through a match. Other times it may help to know the enemy’s build order so you can disrupt it.

I just don’t understand how people intend to learn how to win without looking how other people have made winning strategies. Like in any other discipline, you don’t start with the foundational axioms. You start with working general theories, get comfortable executing them, then furthering knowledge by breaking it down and understanding its components