I am not a programmer but your line of argument begged the question, “Are more options better, more efficient/effective, etc. or otherwise desirable?” Sure, if the only criterion you are trying to fulfill is “have as many options and different ways to complete the task at hand as possible,” you are correct that you can emulate a CLI within a GUI so you can accomplish a task both by clicking or typing instead of just typing.
However the parent you are responding to stated that having these additional choices (what he terms as “noise”) is clearly not effective for him so he disagrees with your original premise. Apparently for them “less is more” which is certainly understandable.
I used to have a desktop keyboard with the nipple in the traditional middle of the keyboard configuration so your fingers could stay on the home row but something about it was off maybe the acceleration or something I’m sure I could’ve fixed it in software if I were smarter but it never just worked like the Thinkpad ones