I would hazzard a guess that quite a lot of engineers are into cooking because it can be a highly technical and scientific process that involves chemistry, physics, and engineering with delicious results.
And the highly technical paper in this post attests to that.
If you don't care about it, can you even imagine how much other people don't care about you not caring about it? Seriously. And if you think it's silly to point that out, you're the one posting in a thread about how you don't care about the thing that the thread is about.
I personally find it pretty amazing that, as they mention, no one has succeeded in making a robot that can do it effectively. That is certainly a technical issue. It seems to me something that is highly automatable.
The fact that it is something that physicists are studying and it is published on Ars Technica seems to me to be enough to justify it being technical enough for Hacker News (which generally doesn't have to be technical per se, but just intellectually interesting to technically oriented people)
What the Discovery channel, I mean ArsTechnica, calls "science" shall not be questioned! ;)
Also it has "Royal Society" in the paper so it has carte blanche to pick seemingly frivolous topics if they have merit. Furthermore, very good cooking is mostly scientific with some art. French Guy Cooking's Alex has more of a lab/workshop than a kitchen because he's so fanatical to improve the art and science of food.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.062...