Electric has improved, and that includes oven and hob, gas is wasteful but cheap to start with, but to burn gas the air has to be renewed to get more oxygen so there is a constant change of air, and the hot air goes into the kitchen, so the kitchen needs extractor fans both to remove combustion produces and heat, cooker hoods need to vent outside there is no real option for using a simple carbon filter, so there is a lot involved with burning gas where for safety reasons it is still allowed, after
Ronan Point it was not permitted in many buildings.
My electric oven has I think 4 elements arranged on a 12 way switch so you can select how the oven heats, top, side, back, with or without fan. Better ovens also have steam, and it is well insulated so although there is a cooling fan to keep outside cool, most of the heat is retained in the oven, there is no reason why a gas powered oven can't have a heat exchanger clearly oil and solid fuel ovens use a heat exchanger, so the flue gases are kept away from the food, may be there are some? but I have never seen any, I suspect you can get a gas fired range cooker? but personally I want to keep kitchen cool.
The induction hob has been the main change, the old electric hob was slow, and stayed hot long after it was switched off, and control was also slow, pre-induction I can see why people wanted gas, but the induction is faster than gas, safer than gas, and heats the kitchen less than gas, as to running costs likely on par, although gas is more wasteful it costs less to buy, but I have yet failed to find a gas cooker that auto turns off when pan is removed, or auto turns off at all, all the safety features found with induction are missing with gas, however will admit if using a wok then gas is better as pan can be lighter, and many an induction hob is spoiled by use of touch controls, induction can react very rapid, as the milk pan starts to boil like gas you can turn off rather than lift the pan, as long as the human machine interface (HMI) is also fast, a knob works great, many touch controls are simply too slow.
As to modulation v mark/space control, with old electric there was likely a minute between the mark/space, but with solid state control that has reduced, so one would find it hard to see the difference between modulation and mark/space now, to use multi elements with a 32 amp supply is great, but with a 13 amp supply it needs some time sharing, and I know my mothers built in oven may have had same features to our stand alone, but they time shared with the built in oven so did not work as well.
Some features like closed door grilling work very well, only need to turn bacon once as the fan heats under bacon as well as on top, however the problem is lack of cook books to tell you how to use it.
Mrs Beeton lived just as gas was being experimented with, but there were not really any gas cookers when she was alive, so she would have used a range cooker, with the range cooker you have dampers to direct the flue gases so you can heat areas of the oven as you can now with electric, and I am sure there would have been instructions on how to heat oven depending on what food is being cooked, but buy a Mrs Beeton cook book today and it has instructions like gas mark 4, she never had gas, and even if she had one of the early cookers, it would not be calibrated as gas marks. They have clearly been rewritten and instructions for solid fuel removed and gas added.
I know my mother would either allow oven to raise or fall in temperature when baking as as yet not seen a programmable oven where you can set it to raise or fall in temperature while baking, unlike the solid fuel, I know some things the fire was allowed to burn out, as a boy I was told, don't put any coke on the stove, I am letting it burn out, but being a boy I was not taught how to cook.
I am sure if the gas cooker was invented today, it would be banned as not being safe.
