I’m 100% with you on the health stuff, but out of genuine curiosity:

its first specific and ridiculous lie: claiming that a hookah is an early form of vape

It is, though? You might think of an e-cig when you hear “vape” but it’s short for “vaporization” or “vaporizer”, which are actually different from smoking.

In smoking you light the material itself on fire and draw the smoke produced by the active incineration of the material into your lungs.

In vaping you heat the air around a substance (even loose plant material) and cause the actual material to vaprize, not incinerate, and you inhale that vapor, not smoke.

The key differences being a lack of tar and similar gunk from the actual flame, despite seeming like a mere semantic difference there are actual physical differences.

It’s been a while since I saw a hookah in action, but my understanding is that they heat up the air with charcoal and that you then draw that past the tobacco and through water before it goes into your lungs. That’s the exact same thing my Ditanium desktop vaporizer does, except it uses a quartz heater and not charcoal. The plant matter itself doesn’t burn, so no tar. Maybe some from the charcoal, but even then the claim that it’s an early version of what is today called vaping is probably a fair assessment.