I wasn't suggesting that we'd be better off if cars and trucks didn't exist at all - that is an actual straw man.

Where I suspect we agree is that with better planning decisions, trucks and cars could make up a much smaller slice of shipping and personal transportation, largely in favour of trains for both and feet/bikes/other transit for the latter. We have lots of other places to look to for examples of this.

What I disagreed with was the idea that once automobiles existed they were so obviously superior to the alternatives that they quickly took off and it was inevitable they would become almost the exclusive mode of transportation in most North American cities, and that car-centrism is a necessary trade-off to have fresh food, distributed supply chains, regional trade, labour mobility, etc.

In fact, cars took a while to reach saturation, and a lot of the regulatory, land use, and planning decisions that led us there were made under intense lobbying from car and oil companies.

Among the disadvantages cars had at their introduction, the number of people they killed and maimed was a big one. Prior to cars, streets were shared by pedestrians, horse drawn carts, hand carts, strollers, bicycles (at the end), etc, who kind of mutually agreed not to run into each other. Cars were quite bad at this and the consequences were horrifying, and lots of towns considered banning them. Instead, under lobbying, the old practice of "using the street" was redefined as "jaywalking", so instead of hitting a pedestrian being an offense by the driver it was the pedestrian's own fault for breaking the rules; and the introduction of civil traffic laws and liability insurance meant that most traffic deaths and injuries were handled as minor infractions rather than as manslaughter or criminal negligence.

Other unnecessary changes that cars required included mandating a massive supply of parking (trains and trams and taxis, on the other hand, leave when you finish using them), the space taken by which made all other ways of getting around less feasible; the underdevelopment or demolition of public transit; handwaving away the health and environmental effects of pollution (including a cigarette-level conspiracy to deny the harms of leaded gasoline; I could go on.

Anyway, point being, while trucks or cars are undeniably the best for a few specific use cases which are important to modern life, the vast majority of their collective mileage wouldn't be needed for our current quality of life but for a century's worth of planning and regulatory decisions that were made under pressure from the car lobby (which nowadays includes regular folks who can't really conceive of any other lifestyle). We can actually start making better decisions now though, so please do vote in municipal elections.