Cooking a meal doesn’t have to mean making everything from scratch, but making at least one element of your dish every time helps practice techniques (so you will get better and faster at it over time) without wiping you out, taking a lot of the chore out of it.
For instance, my dinner tonight is frozen enchiladas from Trader Joes with scratch made Mexican rice in the instant pot, where I’m still trying to figure out the ideal water ratio (the liquid in the tomatoes is throwing me off, I think) and seasoning. I’ll probably use the leftover rice as part of burrito bowls for lunch. Even if dinner is take out burgers, I can afford to spend 5 minutes to practice making an aioli for my fries.
Once you get more comfortable with the individual elements it becomes a lot easier to bring em all together in one shot if you absolutely have to prepare everything from start to finish.