I find it amusing that Sketch and Figma are considered "traditional tools" now. It wasn't so long ago that neither of these existed, and everything was Photoshop.
Oh also remember Dreamweaver :)
What I always find interesting about these pieces, is they always seem to be saying “they’re old now and need to be replaced” rather than marveling at the durability of original approach, which has been astounding. Same can be said for plain text, Unix shell tools, spreadsheets, NLE editors, the DAW. These should be celebrated for how successful their designs have been, instead of lamenting how many “old tools” we're using.
For me, the last "killer" Photoshop feature was layers. That was in 1994. I still use it every day, but only because I have almost 30 years of muscle memory. It's getting slower and slower for every release.
Granted, it inherited a bunch of nifty web-savvy features from Adobe ImageReady in the first half of the 2000s, but the whole sh*tshow that went down when ImageReady was killed was internal politics and a sign of crappy things to come.
It's interesting that the same navel-gazing, customer-ignoring attitude that killed QuarkXPress in favour of Adobe InDesign struck Adobe.
(By "killer", I mean a feature that completely changed the way I could work with graphics. Sure, I've saved a bunch of time with Actions, but the feature was not transformative.)
I've used Sketch, Illustrator, and Photoshop pretty heavily in my career.
Your statement is a bit like saying that a motorbike is just a bicycle with a few specialized features for people who want to go fast.
The way component libraries, CSS outputs and Craft plugins work with Sketch make it a totally different workflow to Illustrator, even if the basic features are the same (draw vectors).
People were touting it like the new hot shit, when it came out, but from a developer point of view it still felt like building with legos.
But yeah, if you say "everything was Photoshop" than Sketch and Figma are orders of magnitude better, haha.