Does Sugar Cook Eggs? There's a old wives tale of sugar cooking eggs. I was wondering if there's any substance to that or if it's merely a concentration of the egg as the sugars absorb water.

I was watching The Try Guys and on this pie episode the guest chef explains the various pitfalls of making a pecan pie. She goes on to say how letting eggs and sugar sit together too long will cause the eggs to cook the yolk and possibly ruin the dish. I've never heard of eggs being "cooked" from sugar so I did a brief overview. 

Overall, I'm curious if this has any real validity or if it's just a misconception. 

The episode is linked along with an article about it.
Try Guy Pie Ep @ 7:39
Article
It's not really chemistry¹, but simple physics:  you can have the same result with salt. (and an experiment you can easily replicate at home: salt is much cheaper than sugar).  

What happens is that the salt and the sugar and a whole lot of other things indeed absorb the water in the egg, which makes the proteins in the egg unfold, hook into one another and make these dehydrated eggs look just like cooked eggs where the heat does the same thing: unfold proteins.

Even if you add water again, these polymerized proteins will not re-absorb the water as they cannot unfold just like with a cooked egg: you can easily boil an egg, but it's hard to melt it again afterwards...  ;-)

So it's a common misconception as the cooked and the dehydrated versions both look very similar, even under a microscope.

Note¹: To all the chemists and physicists out there: yes, it's an endless debate whether boiling an egg is chemistry or physics... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯