Perhaps this is an American thing but I have never once seen the term "cooking" being relegated to only situations where one is making food completely from scratch. However, the discounting of convenience food absolutely happens and I think it discourages a lot of people from trying to cook in the first place.

Recipe websites don't really help with this either, the ones that tend to pop up at the top of Google search results will often be significantly more involved and require way more in the way of ingredients than most people would be able to justify purchasing for a single meal. If a meal has more than five steps and takes more than three perishable ingredients, then it's not something that most people will make if cooking is not their hobby. Those are the meals that I think we should be focusing more on showing to people, and those are the ones that would convince people to cook more.