Craig Mazin and John August have often argued on Scriptnotes[1] that this type of structural perspective can be useful for analysis, but not when writing. For example, you can often think of a movie as having three acts, but knowing that doesn’t help you write the movie. It’s more a symptom of good writing than a recipe.
One of the first things you usually do as part of planning a season of a dramatic TV show is to figure out the arc of each character, up or down. You can't get anywhere unless you know where you're going. And then yes, it's similarly an extremely conscious part of the writing process at the episode level, act level, and scene level. It's very much "recipe" in that sense -- but that's not to take away from any of the creativity. It's just the basic structure for creativity, the frame.
Now, of course, it's recipe because of lots of trial and error in writing stories and seeing what stories worked and which didn't. If you're writing something shorter like a movie, you may very well implement the pattern on your own through intuition. But you also may very well not, and the script will have problems, and rewriting will be a lot more successful if you're aware of structure and not just relying on intuition.
But then you have books of rules like "Save the Cat!" that identify a lot of beats that you do usually find in screenplays. Maybe not all the ones are in every script, but it's uncanny how the midpoint is almost always as described to where you can pause it when you feel the beat and you're halfway through the film.
Craig Mazin and John August have often argued on Scriptnotes[1] that this type of structural perspective can be useful for analysis, but not when writing. For example, you can often think of a movie as having three acts, but knowing that doesn’t help you write the movie. It’s more a symptom of good writing than a recipe.
1: https://scriptnotes.net/