Before even getting to documentation, I see so many projects that don’t have a short summary of what they do (and maybe what to not expect them to do).

As an example, Home Assistant. I can tell that it involves home automation, so can I replace Google Home with it? It seems like it doesn’t do voice recognition without add-ons and it can work with Google Assistant. Do I still need accounts with the providers of smart appliances, or can it control my bulbs directly?

None of that is very clear from the website.

I’ve seen plenty of other projects where it’s assumed there’s no need to explain it’s overall purpose.

My first example was “a cup of frozen chicken strips”.

I know I can make a guess how much they mean, but I could easily be off by a factor of 2.

It really wouldn’t be hard to have the weight listed.

This sounds like a catch-22 problem.

Maybe scales could be improvised, with a stick, some cups, and awkward-shaped chunks of chicken in one of the cups.

True, but that’s just replacing a cup with a length, and rules out using an existing tub.

Why not use weight, which is easy to measure and tolerant of different forms/shapes?

https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/

(Yes, the “bird poop” one is correct, it does talk about fuel consumption too).

A similar chart could be made for the US, proving that it does use metric: soda and wine bottles, medicine doses, eye-glasses measurements (in fact most medical things).

I think that both systems are used in schools now.

But then I see cooking instructions for a “cup of chicken strips” and a recipe having 1/4 cup of butter, and I wonder why anyone thought that volume was a good idea there.