Cookies can also be queried programmatically, whereas passwords need to have the users auto fill active and interact with the input element
Most extensions have effectively full access to your cookies, not to your passwords - which is a real attack vector (session exfiltration) which is actively being used by had acteues
There are ofc server set cookies which are not programmatically queryable, but that's not the norm (and they're still visible via the developer tools, so the core statement remains untrue)