All us WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic) countries seem to spend a really embarrassing amount of time talking about the pointless minutiae surrounding our candidates for office and their personal lives.
We are also prone to backing very crap candidates based on personality, rhetoric, appearance ie: things that have nothing to do with being a good executive or legislator.
I think we should ban names from the election process and just have each party submit their ideas in writing and let people vote based on those submissions.
I am not American, but I think my statement can be said to be true of the US, UK, France, Canada, Spain and Italy at the very least since these are countries whose recent elections I have followed a bit.
So except for Spain and Italy, the few countries that have single member electoral districts which means you vote for candidates instead of party lists?
Your contradicter is right. You’re basically describing the list system, which is the purest form of PR and pretty common in Europe. You vote for a platform and a list, not for individuals.