In answer to the OP, yes, it sounds as if you have vaporized a lot of actives while cooking with too much heat.
Obviously strain selection plays a huge role
Actually, where cooking is concerned, variety (strains refer to viruses, not plants) selection plays a much lesser role than when we are dealing with uncooked material. Remember, most of the varieties that are common these days are type I chemovars with high THC and very little of other major/minor cannabinoids. What sets the effects of one high THC plant from another when there are negligible other cannabinoids present in most of these plants? Terps are what. Terps are why when you get a plant that has the same amount of THC as another, with negligible CBD/CBG/CBGA/CBDA/THCV/THCVA etc, it can still have very different effects when you vape/dab it.
Those terps also boil at incredibly low temps. In a cooking situation, the temp and timeframe that we use to decarb is going to destroy and degrade those terps. What remains will retain negligible terp content and so the differences between strains are muted, if not entirely removed. Edibles can be wonderful, but if you're adding high terpene containing material of any kind to something that you're going to heat significantly before consuming, you are wasting the best part of your starting material.
Edibles IMO should be made with waste byproducts from inhalable extractions, or from AVB. That way, you can make sure that you make the most of these most valuable actives (which would generally be spoiled by cooking) whilst not wasting what is left over.
As to recommending flowers over concentrates for sleep - I would never cook with flowers, unless the flowers were of such low quality that I didn't want to extract bubble/rosin etc from them (if that were the case, I would not have bought the flowers in the first place). Anything extra you'll get from those flowers over the concentrates I describe about is largely inactive vegetative plant material, not resin. Some may like to eat these due to personal preference, there can even be nutritional value in that flower, but in terms of quantity of sleep inducing actives, you should not expect benefits from cooking with flower over and extract from that flower. The sleep inducing components of the flower that will not be found in lower grade extracts are going to be reliably degraded/destroyed in most cooking processes.
The sleep inducing components found in flower that are not found in lower grade extracts are found more abundantly in higher grade extracts than in the flower itself! Myrcene and linalool are much more abundant in high terpene containing extracts than in the original flower. If you have full melt produced appropriately, you'll end up with greatly higher quantities of these components than in the original flower with a very full representation of the entire chemical profile of the original resin on the flower. Of course, all of this is relevant to inhaling, not for cooking, which will diminish the relevant actives (whilst contributing some other sleep inducing actives such as CBN).
When it comes to inhaling for sleep, I've got very persistent, lifelong and neurologically based insomnia. Flowers are useless for that, enough may make me fall asleep, but I wake up very soon after. Inhalable concentrates are the best medicine I've ever used for lasting sleep and will have added years to my life due to the medications that they have replaced. Cooking with every last bit of resin that I can get out of my extraction byproducts is just gravy
left the pot..
I obviously have a lot to learn.
