When I started wood working, I bought supplies from my local hardware store. Then I discovered I liked it and started looking into what else was out there. Now 90% of my workshop is either special ordered or I made it custom for myself.

When I started making cheese, I bought a “make your own cheese!” kit at the local health food store and followed the directions in the kit. I discovered I really enjoyed it. Now I have multiple books on the philosophy of cheesemaking and source my cultures from specialty shops halfway across the country.

I played a lot of pool in college in grad school. For several years I would just grab the cue nearest the table and have at it. Eventually I bought my own cue that had precisely the length, weight, and shape that I preferred, and brought it with me when it was time to play.

And when I first got into kink, my approach was the exact same - I and my partner at the time got a cheap BDSM starter kit from a sex shop, and tried out the stuff that the local kink community told us we ought to be doing. We discovered we liked being kinky together, and explored the particulars from there until our dynamic was fully custom.

In almost every hobby, most people start with “off the rack” materials because it requires less up front consideration and investment, and therefore less frustration over time and money wasted if we discover it’s not for us.

That’s how I see the “how do I” posts. Newbies want something quick and easy that they can try out today instead of having to resource and plot and debate and reflect over something they might not like. And, yea, it’s definitely not going to be as fulfilling an experience as a dynamic developed and customized over a period of time. But it will probably give them a sense of whether this is something they like enough to put the work into developing and customizing that dynamic. And even then, they may want a survey of the sorts of things other people do to use not as a copy and paste sort of thing, but as inspiration for how their dynamic might further develop.

Kink is customizable. And long term, everyone’s kink should be custom to them. But imo the problem with the “how do I” posts is not that it shows a lack of individuality or originality - we all start off lacking those. The problem is that it shows a lack of internet forum etiquette, which usually dictates doing a search of the forum to see if any recent threads deal with your topic of inquiry before creating your own.