As a broke PhD student, my conclusion was that I just need to cook more. As pointed out in the article, the ingredients cost a small fraction of the price of the dish. Yes, its a bit time consuming but its also interesting to make different dishes, and many things like lasagna or biriyani can be batch cooked. There's a lot of really interesting dishes that don't take a whole lot of time per portion.

If you like Indian food, you can make absolutely gigantic batches of curry in the instant pot for low effort (stove top also viable requires a bit more attention), then freeze or refrigerate the curry and serve it with rice or protein of choice at your leisure. Awesome for college students because you can make not-quite restaurant quality food with very limited kitchen supplies.

I would argue that if building one thing is cheaper per unit than building 100 there is something fishy going on. You aren't even good at cooking!