You've got it pretty well. Plastic is polymerized petroleum, right? When you burn the oil to the pan, you are creating polymers. (It's not plastic because plastic means malleable. Seasoning is actually pretty brittle.) They are a bunch of polymerized fatty acids tangled together, like strings in a wad. (If they were like woven strings, it would be crystalline.) A thin layer of tangled strings is smooth. A big pile of tangled strings is not. The other wrinkle is cast iron vs carbon steel. Both need to be seasoned. Cast iron is porous. The second function of seasoning is to fill in those pores. Those pores expand when the pan is hot and contract when the pan cools. That is why cast iron needs to be hot to clean it properly. After it cools, those pores close up around the ook left on the pan. Being well seasoned means that those pores are full of polymers rather than ook, so it is easier to clean. The other side is carbon steel. Those are the thin black pans you see all over the place in restaurants. They need to be seasoned as well, but entirely for non-stick and rust reasons. They don't have the same pores. They can get as slick or slicker than cast iron. (I do most of my cooking in carbon steel.) The season on a carbon steel pan is relatively thin (no pores to grab into) and much easier to damage. The other side is, it's much easier to replace, because it's thin. If I cook eggs, I cook them in a carbon steel skillet. The pan temp is easier to control (less inertia), the surface is slicker, and the pan is light enough to flip the eggs without a spatula (which breaks more eggs for me than flipping.) Carbon steel is really your teflon equivalent. Also, if it gets too hot it doesn't give off poison gas like teflon. (Also most authentic-ish to authentic woks are carbon steel. Treat them the same way.) This is a decent write up: https://devilsfoodkitchen.com/2018/04/14/the-science-of-cast-iron/ I use cast iron all the time, primarily for meat and braises. When you want a rocket hot pan to properly brown meat, one that you can then park in the oven to finish cooking your chop, cast iron all the way. Ditto for long simmering meat sauces (one I also tend to do in the oven to not have to constantly check the burner.) If it's something acidic like tomatoes, I use stainless steel or enameled cast iron. Everything else I tend to use carbon steel (including eggs and almost all vegetables.)