Resistive burners are efficient (though the induction burner he used was faster), but they are not responsive - the heat built up in them does not dissipate nearly as quickly as when you lower the flame on a gas burner. Induction burners are way better in this regard, but you're limited in the cookware you can use. Even aluminum or copper cookware with steel plates don't solve this, because the steel plate does retain the heat. The combination of having a responsive vessel and a responsive heat source gives you a lot more control than just pulling the pan off the heat source and hoping you can juggle it cooling down vs. getting the temp right on the burner, etc. With copper and gas, it is incredibly easy for me to course correct if I realize I'm off on my temp. Copper losing heat so quickly is the key here.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that you can't create a good sauce or work with a delicate protein using induction burners and stainless steel or similar. It's certainly not a requirement! But copper and gas can make it a lot easier once you learn how to use them.
Alex the French Cooking Guy did a video where he purchased a very high end copper sauce pot, and discusses a bit in it (and the rest of his series on sauces) why he went for copper - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ddRK_jG6E
And then there's the element to some stir fried dishes that simply can't be recreated with inductive or resisitive burners alone. Wok Hei isn't universal in Chinese stir-fry, despite some people acting like you have to incorporate it for every single dish you make in a wok, but it is important for some dishes and some regional cuisines. The science behind what wok hei is enough that there are whole chapters dedicated to it in serious treatises on stir frying like Kenji Alt-Lopez's latest book, but the cliff notes is that a lot of it has to do with flames licking up over the the wok. You can kind of recreate this at home by using a small hand torch, but I've never had as good of results with that as going to my backyard and hooking up my high BTU wok burner.
Which reminds me of a good point - propane and butane are not classified as greenhouse gasses, and are perfectly viable substitutes for cooking with gas. I use butane for my indoor Iwatani burner, and propane for my outdoor burner and pizza oven. For indoor use both have general air quality/pollution issues (though no more than existing gas setups, from my understanding), so they're not a magic bullet. But the vast majority of my cooking happens on my induction burner - I'm not super concerned about the infrequent exposure when I really need to reach for the Iwatani to achieve what I'm after.
they are not responsive - the heat built up in them does not dissipate nearly as quickly as when you lower the flame on a gas burner.
Clearly this is true, but I don't see any reason it needs to be under most usage conditions. On my electric stove, when I want to stop applying heat, I move the pan to side, off the heated surface.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that you can't create a good sauce or work with a delicate protein using induction burners and stainless steel or similar. It's certainly not a requirement! But copper and gas can make it a lot easier once you learn how to use them.
Serious Eats did a good primer on copper cookware, including some interesting links like the cooking for engineers post -https://www.seriouseats.com/buying-copper-cookware
Alex the French Cooking Guy did a video where he purchased a very high end copper sauce pot, and discusses a bit in it (and the rest of his series on sauces) why he went for copper - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ddRK_jG6E
And then there's the element to some stir fried dishes that simply can't be recreated with inductive or resisitive burners alone. Wok Hei isn't universal in Chinese stir-fry, despite some people acting like you have to incorporate it for every single dish you make in a wok, but it is important for some dishes and some regional cuisines. The science behind what wok hei is enough that there are whole chapters dedicated to it in serious treatises on stir frying like Kenji Alt-Lopez's latest book, but the cliff notes is that a lot of it has to do with flames licking up over the the wok. You can kind of recreate this at home by using a small hand torch, but I've never had as good of results with that as going to my backyard and hooking up my high BTU wok burner.
Which reminds me of a good point - propane and butane are not classified as greenhouse gasses, and are perfectly viable substitutes for cooking with gas. I use butane for my indoor Iwatani burner, and propane for my outdoor burner and pizza oven. For indoor use both have general air quality/pollution issues (though no more than existing gas setups, from my understanding), so they're not a magic bullet. But the vast majority of my cooking happens on my induction burner - I'm not super concerned about the infrequent exposure when I really need to reach for the Iwatani to achieve what I'm after.