I am sure that Germany has many more words on how to describe cooked onions. Likewise, we have at least a dozen words in the English language for how to cook onions, that also translate directly to the German oddly enough. Unfortunately people who write on-line recipes have latched on to the caramelized onion notation and are not particularly explicit in what they actually want. Having gone through four years of culinary training, I now look at recipes on-line with a very critical eye and much like how you can identify the copy & paste code and architecture of a junior developer, you can also identify the recipe borrowing and construction of people who are better at blogging than they are at cooking.