This article is, in one respect, quite misleading. It compares gas ranges to a specific induction hob: the Breville Control Freak. This device is not actually complicated per se, but it is a masterpiece of good (or at least decent) UX and control design in a way that makes it almost incomparable to anything else on the market. Cooking with it is a rather different experience than using any normal stove.
There’s actually a large learning curve. With a normal stove of any sort, you set a power level. Different stoves have different degrees of responsiveness, differing levels of UI annoyance (knobs at one end; phone apps at the other), and different abilities to work well at low power, but they do fundamentally the same thing. The Control Freak knob does not control power; it controls _tempererature_. To boil pasta, you set it to 240 (F) or so. To carmelize onions, something like 330 will do it, and the onions won’t burn. Want to keep your stew warm? Set it to 160 and ignore it. If you put someone who hasn’t used one before in front of one, they get rather confused until they get the hang of it. If you out someone used to it in front of a normal stove, they’re disappointed.
Yeah, we splurged on a Control Freak 3 years ago; it was on sale because they were phasing out the ones with the NEMA 5-20 plugs, honestly it's better if you have the 20A hookup.
The idea we had was that we'd use it for Cantonese hot pot, and just put it away in its case for storage the rest of the time.
We were dead wrong. It takes up a lot of counter space in our apartment kitchen, but since we unboxed it it has never moved from the counter for the last 3 years.
It has replaced our hob for 80% of cooking (in general, we only use the hob when we need to cook two things at once), and when it's not in use for other things, we leave a kettle on top of it.
It's also industrially specced so we can actually leave it on forever -- when we have a stew we want to eat tomorrow, sometimes we just leave it at 65°C until we want to eat it the next day.
It's so amazing I wish it came in a 4 hob configuration and we can replace our stovetops completely (GE has something similar, but we've had terrible experiences with GE appliances).
There’s actually a large learning curve. With a normal stove of any sort, you set a power level. Different stoves have different degrees of responsiveness, differing levels of UI annoyance (knobs at one end; phone apps at the other), and different abilities to work well at low power, but they do fundamentally the same thing. The Control Freak knob does not control power; it controls _tempererature_. To boil pasta, you set it to 240 (F) or so. To carmelize onions, something like 330 will do it, and the onions won’t burn. Want to keep your stew warm? Set it to 160 and ignore it. If you put someone who hasn’t used one before in front of one, they get rather confused until they get the hang of it. If you out someone used to it in front of a normal stove, they’re disappointed.