I'm not that knowledgeable, I'm just some guy.

Cooking vs raw is a point of contention even with ZC proponents. I am a ZC proponent and I have discussed this topic many times before. As far as I'm aware, there is no definite answer, so when we ask "Do I need to eat raw meat?", a simple yes/no answer just won't do. I mean, maybe there is a definite answer, but personally I haven't found it, so I go with the safe bet instead.

Anyways, like previous posters said, cooking destroys nutrients, and that's the safe bet I go with. With Pottenger's cats for example, taurine is destroyed by cooking, cats can't synthesize it, so cats need the meat raw. Humans can synthesize taurine so that's not much of a problem. The point is, the principle that cooking destroys nutrients is established. From there, without even knowing which nutrient is destroyed by cooking, we can still make a reasonable decision. Do I eat all my meat raw, all the time, every time, forever? I could, but maybe I don't have to. Maybe I can eat some of it cooked, even some of it cooked thoroughly. Can I eat all my meat cooked thoroughly, all the time, every time, forever? No, I don't think that's a good idea, because cooking destroys nutrients. So, a reasonable decision would be something like what I said before. I don't have to eat raw meat all the time, but I can't eat thoroughly cooked meat all the time either, something in-between should be just fine.

I didn't read much about cooking vs raw, but the little I did read still gave me enough to decide. For example, the Bellevue all-meat experiment (I posted a link a few posts earlier) was done on humans, so we can rely on it and apply it to ourselves directly, at least more directly than cats or mice experiments. In that experiment, they didn't experiment with cooking vs raw specifically, but they did mention something about cooking vs raw to describe the diet. The subjects ate both cooked and raw, and they were just fine. Can we conclude anything about cooked vs raw specifically? No, I don't think we can, but I think we can still conclude that if we did the same as they did, then we'd probably be just fine too. In that paper I linked, there's a hint about a specific benefit of eating raw meat:

It's just a hint because it's just an anecdote. But it agrees with the principle that cooking destroys nutrients.

As for your "or anything else for that matter", we're talking about cooking broccoli or potatoes or something like that, right? Well, just like it does with meat, cooking destroys nutrients in plants. But cooking also destroys plant fiber (which we can't digest otherwise), and this then allows the nutrients contained therein to be available to us. So it simultaneously makes plants both more and less nutritious. Personally, I think plants are not food for humans, so I'm not concerned with finding out the truth here, so I didn't look that hard for information about it, so my opinion on this doesn't really matter.

I'd also like to address what Meme#1 said. Specifically that animals have worms, their meat has worms, cooking destroys those and destroys ameba. I agree. On the other hand, I also think that if we assume we're fully adapted to eat meat, and especially raw meat, then it follows that we should also be adapted to deal with whatever is in that meat normally. On the third hand, I don't really like to find something wrong with my meat, so I don't eat that particular piece of meat, I'll eat another piece that looks right, that looks like it came from a healthy animal. I can remember only one time when I was eating a nice juicy pork chop cooked to perfection and something was just wrong when I was cutting it up in my plate. Well, that was it for that pork chop, it went straight in the garbage. I took another pork chop and that one was fine so I ate that one. So I guess here it's about how good the meat is, how healthy the animal is, how clean the butcher's tools are, how clean the slaughterhouse's tools are, how well the animals were fed, etc. If everything's good at every step, the meat is good it's not infected or anything, then it's just a matter of personal taste.