Do you get nice tasty caramelized onions, then? I love caramelized onions, but they’re a pain in the ass to make.
Yes! It’s slower but much easier to roast them in the oven: 350ªF for around an hour. Stir at least once. I use butter, but other oils can work too. Supposedly one can caramelize onions without any form of fat, but we’ll ignore those people.
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Unfortunately while it sounds good in theory, it doesn’t actually work out that well. When your baking/roasting something heat transfer from the pan, a baking stone, etc; is far more efficient/better at causing browning and crisping. The holes in a pan like this reduce the amount of metal in contact with the food, reducing that effect. The holes also don’t tend to be generously spaced enough to properly “surround” the food with air to cause even roasting (the food will brown faster where it contacts metal as opposed to where it contacts air). Evenness is the point of this sort of thing. Sogginess comes from crowding the pan or cooking at the wrong temp, trapping steam. You’d be better off cooking in an half sheet pan with a wire rack if your goal is even roasting/surrounding the food with air. Pizza places that use this sort of thing are in general (at least in NY) not as good as places that bake directly on the deck or in a proper greased cast iron/carbon steel pan. And the thing they use that is like this thing is actually not all that much like this thing. It tends to be a wire mesh, rather than a non-stick with few holes drilled in it. Add in the fact that they’re typically non-stick and light weight (which means they need frequent replacement) and its probably not all that worth it.
This sort of pan does have some utility in grilling items that would ordinarily drop through the grates. But in that case you definitely want to think like the lack luster pizzaiolos who use mesh gates. More space less metal. The closer you can get to wire mesh the better. The best examples I’ve used have actually been dirt cheap (often home made) wire mesh fish baskets.
Hmm! I assume you’re using a regular baking pan, rather than this perforated one, or else you’d have an ovenful of burnt butter. About how much butter do you use, and about how much onion? Do you toss the chopped onion in the butter beforehand? I guess what I want is a precise recipe. 
You silly: precision is for baking, not cooking.
If I’m making them for French onion soup, I start them in a cast iron (i.e., stove-to-oven safe) pan and then put it into the oven, so the sliced onion is swimming in butter. After that, I put the pan back on the stove to continue making the soup.
Roasting for the fun of it, toss the onions with a small amount of olive oil plus herbs/garlic (whatever suits that meal) on a cookie sheet or jelly roll pan. Use parchment paper and cleanup is a breeze.
I don’t use a perforated sheet for roasting anything.
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