you don't keep cooked meat for long enough for the surviving, or new bacteria to multiply to dangerous levels

Then why, when I was growing up, did they have all those "you'll be sorry" commercials about not leaving your cooked food out on the counter for more than a couple hours?

OK, so maybe if you cook your meat in spices, you can't smell the bugs as easily.

It's got nothing to do with spices. Compare the smell of room temperature raw meat and cooked meat, left out for a couple hours: the cooked meat emits very little scent, period, while the raw meat still smells good. Just the fact that there's more scent means you can detect a finer-grained change in the scent... and the same thing goes for the flavor.

So as long as the bacteria in question are changing the scent, you're going to be able to detect it more easily in the raw.

It's pretty reasonable to assume that somewhere in our evolutionary ancestry, it was advantageous to be able to tell whether some borderline raw meat was safe for eating or not. Whereas, the opportunity for selection on detecting the safety of borderline cooked flesh has been somewhat more limited in scope, as well as being a more difficult task just due to the destruction of some of the meat's scent-producing capacity.

If you had a credible reference for the claim I wouldn't be as suspicious.

I'm not clear on what you mean by "suspicious". I'm certainly not trying to persuade anyone to follow my dietary choices, here. I was just answering somebody else's question.