Well, nobody is surprised about the cookie-cutter plot -- what is surprising is that the boy is clearly competent, yet they still make absolutely no personal judgement. I.E: The way it is written made the whole chapter seem absolutely stupid.
I mean, can a person who has 0 magic power, can even use magic? And then destroy all 200 pieces, which then gets counted as 1 because "hud durr the machine..."? etc...
If it's usually forced, this time it's exceptionally badly written.
P.S: It's because of stories like these that I wonder how bloody cheap is it to hire someone to draw such gorgeous comics for you? It's insane. So many of these stories get single-handedly carried by the art.
I enjoy a bunch of cookie cutter plots and whatnot, I'm in the camp that a story told well is ultimately an entertaining story worth reading. After all, we keep rewatching very similar stories or eating similar meals means, we just want the execution done well.
A grilled cheese sandwich is just bread, butter and cheese. But a good grill cheese sandwich is always nice to eat. While one done badly, burnt bread, overly thicc cheese that hasn't melted and doesn't taste right, that's just crap.
In this case, to date it really did feel like it was going down the RTA for tropes. If you go back, the worldbuilding was relatively minimal so you couldn't judge, but the story beats were all very low effort copy paste of other similar isekai stories. The level of uniqueness was barr none, and everything was just trucking along to go from one trope to the next. Consider how it was discovered he had all elements and nobody really batted an eye on that from the common servant to his over the moon dunce parents. It was very clear that consistent world building would take a dive, nobody questioned his level of intellect either or really questioned his level of strength. Every other characters were behaving exactly as NPC side characters to help prop him up and move the story along.
This one chapter just happens to be the one most eggregious in your face obnoxiously evident that the author is uninspired and doing a collage of tropes that's more easily noticed.
So honestly. I wasn't surprised at all. You had two choices. Either he would be graded as incompetent and go the route of initially be set for the lowest class, underdog story. Or we begin his rise to power early and he gets sent to the super special SSS Class.
There was no middle ground here based on how the author was writing the story to date.
The next step is, will this be a Food Wars situation where the back end higher up go "Hey you failed him but we're going to sneak him into the super special SSS Class" or are they going to play the "Hey, you're in the F class, but secretly the F class is super competent while the SSS Class is a bunch of elitist dipshit for you to feel good about the F Class beating them up, except maybe the one romantic heroine that's in the SSS Class that's a really nice person except everyone else is a bully" route.
Edit: And the quality of his writing was also pretty sloppy from start to finish. I mean think about it, right off the bat the parents think he's a demon child and want to kill him. So they give the child out for adoption? That's unexplained, that's contrived, that's just setup for the run of the mill story bit we've seen in a few other isekai stories that have been written and printed to date.
We're just supposed to look the other way because his new parents are such great kind people, but logically it makes no sense and is honestly just as baffling as the examiners blatantly ignoring obvious test results. There is no logical follow-through. There is just the race to the next story trope so he can start being a misunderstood overpowered herbivore MC who will accidentally get a harem of underaged girl that he can legally shag with because he's a reincarnated pre-teen with the mind of an adult male and his harem will all be super elite women who he overpowers.
Again, I like my trashy stories, but I recognize what they are. I also want them written well, Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World for example to me is an example of a super trashy story written superbly well, though the pacing is absolutely slow as snails because the author takes so long to go over every step of the adventure, but I can recognize the thought, the consistency and the world building. And also that every character written, even though they're clearly made to be his harem to bang and adventure with, are given clear personalities, stories, motivation and backstories.
A simple meal made well is worth it's weight in gold and is far better than an extravagant meal made poorly.
Edit 2: And unfortunately, this is shaping up to be a simple meal that a man accidentally burnt because he was too busy looking at what the other chefs were cooking to be able to pay attention to his own meal and is only now discovering salt bae and thinking that he can sprinkle some salt off his elbow unto his burnt ass grilled cheese and fool people into it being a fine meal.