No no, it represents the crossroads of learning

You’re splitting hairs - they are models that change the output of freely accessible models. Just because they can’t generate images without those freely accessible models doesn’t mean they’re not a kind of model on their own.

It’s not really subjective given the amount of resources on this. You don’t need technical knowledge to follow a guide that describes:

1. Download sd-webui
2. Copy model & LoRA into the appropriate folders
3. Open start script

Why would they be VAEs instead of LoRas?

It’s also incredibly simple to use these things, you don’t need any technical knowledge.