The cardinal sin of teaching BJTs is to say that they're current-controlled amplifiers: little current in, big current out. They are not, not really. They're voltage-to-current converters: little voltage wiggle at Vbe, big current wiggle at Ic. This is really not in dispute and anyone who tries to argue for the hFE/beta model as really true is wrong. Certainly, it is a useful approximation and often all you need, but it is not how a BJT really works and so don't pretend it is.
(The link between the two is that the base is not a high impedance input. That is pretty uncommon, so it's not surprising that it's kind of confusing! Because it's a low-impedance input, small changes in applied Vbe correlate directly with small changes in current, so it looks current-controlled. But careful measurements, as I believe are plotted in AoE, reveal the primacy of the Vbe-controlled model.)