Elizabethan/Renaissance Wizards/Sorcerers had many highly developed systems for interacting with angels and demons, asking favors of them, attempting to bind them into servitude, etc. To abandon one's alchemickal studies in favor of making deals with demonic entities is moving from one related discipline to another. Alchemy is practiced not just as an overlapping set of practical methodologies, but as a spiritual discipline, a quest of the soul, ultimately to achieve enlightenment/oneness with deity. I am neither an expert nor a practitioner, but I spent some time studying the history of Alchemy as part of Medieval/Renaissance Studies and everything here checks out, which is thrilling.

The Alchemist Cookbook had an Alchemy Consultant (as well as a Chemistry Consultant) on set, so gets its Alchemy right. In fact, alchemists tended to develop idiosyncratic systems which they guarded and cloaked in code and allegory as a means of ensuring limited secrecy.

Lots of times alchemists would approach venture capital or monarchs/aristocracy for partnerships/assistance, and vice-versa, and certainly alchemists would rate each other on success/failure, but there was no peer-review or open-source data sharing. Alchemy was (and is) much more than that, though, incorporating Ceremonial Magick, Theology, Natural Philosophy and, most importantly, a DIY program of independent inquiry in which there was no central authority, no governing body, to license or approve experimentation, fund projects, etc. The Scientific Revolution (including Chemistry, Physics, Calculus, etc) and Non-Specie Currency Theory are branches of Alchemy in the way that birds are dinosaurs. Without alchemy, we wouldn't have what we understand to be the Modern World.

The alchemist cookbook 2016