Yes but Allrecipes.com didn't cost me hundreds of dollars to get 20-30 high quality cookbooks and had 10,000+ recipes. More importantly, I could trust that the highest-rated recipes, while not necessarily the "best", would be stupid-proof. The only way that recipes got universally high feedback from the average home cook on allrecipes.com is if you could accidentally double or halve any ingredient and it would still taste good. Cookbooks often contain recipes which, while better, are also more particular and require a higher skill floor.

I could also quickly filter against recipes which contained ingredients I didn't like, or filter for recipes which used ingredients I already have on hand.