Italian food = heavy tomato sauce

That wasn’t my original claim. I said it would be impossible to imagine Italian food (as a whole unit) without tomatoes.

You can say a similar thing about Indian food and hot peppers. Yes, there are loads of Indian dishes and staples that don’t have any hot peppers in them but when you ask a random person to think of Indian food they’ll almost certainly be thinking of dishes with mild chilis at the very least.

As a side note, you’ve also confirmed my observation that Italian food is the most heavily-gatekeeped cuisine on the planet, and Italian-American the most disdained.