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Another point of view: it took over ten billion years for the first tree to form in the universe. The first stars were present only after a couple hundred million years.

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There is no way to know this, universe can be chock full of trees of some form on certain type and position of the planet. Later than first stars for sure, but thats about it with our current knowledge

Our current knowledge points to the first planets appearing around one billion years after the big bang (heavy elements need to be bred in stars in sufficient quantities first and be ejected in super novae), and evolution taking another billion years to produce eucaryotic life, then another three billion for plants to form.

So while obviously we can't say for sure, I stand by my original statement when speaking in terms of orders of magnitudes. I think it's a sensible argument.

You can have stars without trees, but you can’t have trees without stars.

If we substitute something else in this argument, we can see that it’s trivially not true for arguing complexity:

You can have stars without lead, but you can’t have lead without stars; Lead (the element) is produced by stars but is itself not more complex than a star.

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