It's not a distraction so much as it's the bait. Gas cooking gets the utility serviced to the building, which enables the gas furnace vs electric heat pump conversation. Gas furnace is cheaper up front, so that's what goes into suburbia.

Builders and developers will always do the absolutely cheapest thing possible to stay competitive, and will only do better when they're either legislated to or consumers demand it. Home builders associations lobby to keep minimum requirements ... minimal, and most consumers just see pretty showers and big kitchen islands, so this is why we still build houses like it's 1980.

Always amuses me how many people care about gas mileage on a $50k car but couldn't give two shits if their $2m home is efficient.

Source: I'm a home designer who frequently has this conversation and that's usually how it goes down.

If your pans are taking time to heat up, you probably had resistive plates, not induction. Induction is FAST - fast to heat up, but also fast to cool down. It's very similar to cooking on gas.

Try curved induction plate. Wok doesn’t work with flat induction plates because the moment you start moving it, you’re not heating it anymore.

Induction is objectively superior in heating speed and heat control. But if your cooking technique doesn’t work with it, the previous statement is meaningless.

Gas stoves are better. Finer control, faster temp changes (esp. when decreasing).

Gas stoves are better in some ways, but “finer control” is debatable. If you turn the knob from 0 to 10, it’s obvious that the energy output is non-linear. On my stove the flame has like 50% of its increase between level 2 and 3 or 4. You also have a more narrow range of heat with gas. That is, the lowest setting has to be high enough that the flame does not blow out, so the min heat is higher than the min level on electric. Electric also gets hotter than gas on the high end.

With electric you get precise control. Power level 5 gives exactly half the heat energy that 10 gives; power level 6 is exactly triple the heat of power level 2. You don’t get that precision with gas. You can only eye-ball it which means harder to get reproduceable results.

You probably meant to say gas gives you /immediate/ control. Conventional electric is quite slow, but induction is fast.

I haven’t heard or read a single pro-gas piece.

Right-wing media apparently. Not American, but from what I gather if you watch NPR, you're a communist and a homosexual. So that means you won't be watching real American media like Fox News.

Stuff like this from a member of congress:

"I’ll NEVER give up my gas stove. If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!"

https://twitter.com/RonnyJacksonTX/status/1612839703018934274?t=ptxUxaAhqE1ax8FwY15cyA

GF was a professional cook for 15 years, still prefers our induction stove to the gas stoves she worked on all this time.

Give me a digital transaction without fees and I'll give up checks. They cost less to accept.

did seem to heat unevenly requiring the pan to be regularly turned to avoid one-sided burning).

That's due to the heating area being incredibly tiny on various crappy induction stoves.

They've served me perfectly well for over a decade.
The difference in supposed quality wouldn't be noticeable to most while the difference in cost definitely would be. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I like my 2012 electric stove. I don't notice any difference in cooking experience when I use my parents' gas stove at their place, except the flames require more aggressive ventilation

Well why are they building them out of sieves?

I cut our gas line 2 years ago from our house! Feels good. Also didn't want to have to invest in a seismic shut off gas valve.

And the heat pump gives us air conditioning, which is a win-win.