You are absolutely right Ostrovska. Selenium IDE was and still is capable of recording user actions.

However the main objective was to fit the comparisons of these tools under a common umbrella of a single framework. With a Playwright CLI, the record and playback will generate a “ready to use code” immediately that can be plugged into any framework of choice or can be run standalone. But the “Record” feature of Selenium IDE will give me a “codeless” version of my user journey which is difficult to run outside the IDE. In order to extract the code, one has to perform the manual Export Test Case As -> Java / JUnit4/ WebDriver which is not too convenient.
Another point is the reliability/stability. The “Scriptless” tests generated by the IDE were half as reliable and stable.

Keeping all these factors in mind, I felt not to use the “Selenium IDE” as a parameter in the comparisons. :)