I feel like nobody in this thread has made a cake before and thinks it's trivial to do, and boxed mixes are just premeasured flour, baking soda, and sugar.

Basic cakes are fairly trivial. A pound cake (or butter cake) for ex is just egg, butter, flour and sugar in equal weights and a bit of baking powder.

The other issue the article's author doesn't discuss is that boxed mixes are usually country specific. What you find in the US is usually not available in 90% of the world, nevermind in the right box size.

I have made many cakes which is how I know that yes, a basic cake is pretty trivial.

Baking a cake IS easy. Try it out XD

Making cookies or basic pound cakes from scratch is trivial. You take a scale, you follow the instructions done. For some cakes it's slightly more complicated when you need to do steps like separating egg whites from egg yolks, whipping the egg whites and reincorporating them to the dough but I've been doing that with my 4 years old son and he starting to get it.

I've made loads and it is trivial. You literally just follow the recipe.

Bread is a lot more difficult due to kneeding and shaping which are skills that must be honed.

Cakes, on the other hand, are just mixing and pouring which any idiot can do. The only real variable is the flour so some recipes might work better in your region than others, but cakes are still much more forgiving than bread (flour is more than half of bread by weight, but often less than a third of a cake).

Such a strange comment. Cakes are old as time. I make a few per year from scratch and they come out great. The dry ingredients are indeed, mainly flour, sugar and leavener. Any skill required is generally in your baking technique and not in mixing those things.