It's not the recipes, it's the discussion. It's the attitude. It's their whole way of doing things. Take, for example, their take on cornbread. "Why cornbread shouldn't have sugar." Okay, why shouldn't it? Other than the obvious answer (because it's gross)?

Well, we go through a long, roundabout explanation for why Southern cornbread sucks but spend zero time on talking about what the rest of the country does and we reveal that back in the '50s white housewives couldn't find anything but masa even though they didn't know it was masa so they fucked with the recipe because the recipe was fucked. Why add sugar? Because the cornmeal sucks:

High-volume steel millers started using corn harvested unripe and dried with forced air, which had less sweetness and corny flavor than its field-ripened counterpart. "You put sugar in the cornmeal because you are not working with brix corn," Roberts says, using the trade term for sugar content. "There's no reason to add sugar if you have good corn."

Okay, so if you're using modern stone-ground meal that doesn't suck, it doesn't need to be sweet. And if you're using cornmeal that does suck, you should probably add sugar (if that sweet whang is what you want, I guess). But the article is "the real reason sugar has no place in Cornbread" and then they finish with this:

And you shouldn't use a grain of wheat flour or sugar. If you start with an old fashioned stone-ground meal like the Anson Mills' Antebellum Coarse White Cornmeal, you'll have no need for such adulterations.

...pretty militant statement for an article about how fucked up ingredients have been and how cooks have been adapting, no? Compare and contrast with the way allrecipes treats cornbread: every comment has something or other they tweaked and it all worked out just fine.

And that's why I hate SeriousEats. I don't care if you're making a scallop souffle - there's no recipe on earth you need to be that dickish about. It'll work most of the time. And attitudes like SeriousEats are the kind of thing that makes people think you have to "mince" garlic rather than crush garlic or else you're making slop.

Grinds my gears.