Not casting any aspersions, but if you have the type of stove where you have to broil in the oven, residual burned fat will totally destroy any scent difference between “done” and “burned” in baked goods. It’s better to get an oven thermometer and figure out if the 350° marking on the dial is really 350°.
Also, most cooks have items they are terrible at. If you love homemade bread, go the bread maker route. It gives consistency. I don’t bake. I don’t see the point. It’s only good warm, and the next morning, is stale (except for cookies). My forte is roasting poultry, broiling chops and steaks, assembling casseroles, and stir-frying.
I thought about this last night, and have two suggestions for the OP. The first is, don’t try an entire dinner of unfamiliar recipes. If you burn one dish, you still won’t go hungry. The second is, do your experimenting on cheap stuff: rice pilaf, scalloped potatoes, fried rice, spaghetti sauce are some dishes which take basic skill to prepare, but need a good hand with spices and herbs.
The first dinner I ever cooked was a turkey dinner for my friends. Not understanding how to do it was actually a plus, as I had no fear in trying it. It was passable (except for the disaster that the gravy turned out to be), and I know now what I did wrong, but just jumping in to try was what set me on the path to learning how to do things better.
The closest I got to cooking as a child was to heat up a can of soup. I steadfastly refused to learn from my mother, who was a very good cook. I was basically a little shit about it. Still, necessity overcomes reluctance, and by trying out things in the spirit of it being fun, I learned how to do it right as an adult.
You CAN learn to do it; you may not be able to learn to do it well for any number of reasons: lack of patience, poor sense of timing, poor sense of smell, etc. My wife is an excellent 1-2 dish cook, but has almost no sense of how to put together a larger meal so that everything is ready at the same time. She has a poor sense of how long things take to get done, and will often do things like putting on the potatoes before the main dish is anywhere near the oven. She’s also easily (and alarmingly) distracted from the task at hand. We’ve had several near disastrous events when she’s walked away from something cooking on the stove and gotten involved with some other task. Burning garlic is a given, and setting off the smoke alarms happens often. We actually had an aluminum espresso maker melt on a burner. I do most of the cooking, or at least make sure I’m in the vicinity to surreptitiously turn down burners when she’s in the kitchen. 