Interacting with a touch screen that may try to distract you is pretty obviously different from touching the physical controls of the car. Plus, the phone is telling you "Interact with me now!" With the radio and climate controls you are free to change them at your convenience.

Finally, I didn't say it was "some crazy dangerous thing". You should mentally flag times when you are writing a reply and have to invent new, extreme, and non-representative language to characterize the position you are replying to. Likely, those will be times when, instead of actually replying, you are just babbling to no purpose. That said - taking your attention off of driving to interact with your phone is certainly sub-optimal from a safety point of view.

One of the biggest goals of a proper navigation app is to not be distracting. It shouldn't ever demand immediate interaction.

"you need to press a button in the next two minutes" isn't any more distracting than what you're already getting.

Steering wheel buttons should be to go for all of these though not every car lets you use them with a paired phones map app unfortunately. You shouldn't have to look at anything or take your hand off the wheel to e.g. lower the temperature the same way as you don't have to in order to activate your wipers. 1 second of distraction on the highway is 100 feet less reaction time not just an example of someone being stubborn.

So you're telling me you never check your blind spots or look away from the road at a billboard or to look at scenery?

Checking blind spots isn't a distraction from safe driving it is part of safe driving, the same can't be said for these other things. If I want to appreciate scenery I just pull over and enjoy it. Particularly worthwhile places tend to have designated spots for this. As for billboards I can't really see why I'd want to be looking at advertisements in the first place, let alone looking at advertisements over looking where I'm driving.