When the cut onion touches a hot grate, that moisture rapidly turns to steam. That steam helps soften baked-on grease, caramelized sugars, and stuck proteins from meat. This makes residue easier to dislodge.
The best outdoor cookware designers understand the most compelling brief isn't to make it do everything - it's to make it do exactly what's needed, beautifully, with nothing extra.
Consumer Reports has reams of data over the decades about both consumer satisfaction and the reliability of every big-name cooktop. Its ratings, which it calls 'predicted reliability,' are gathered directly from surveys of customers, reporting repair and breakage rates going back 10 years to 2015.