Those algorithms may not be doing any pairwise comparisons (e.g. between elements being sorted) but they still do plenty of comparisons.

And some of the algorithms, as described, still end up doing pairwise comparisons in all-but-optimal cases.

(Bucket sort requires items that end up in the same bucket to be sorted. This doesn't happen automatically via the algorithm as stated. Radix sort requires the items at each "level" to be sorted. Neither algorithm specifies how this should be done without pairwise comparisons.)

Counting Sort does work without pairwise comparisons, but is only efficient for small ranges of values, and if that's the case then it's obvious you don't need to apply a traditional sort if the number of elements greatly outnumbers the number of possible values.

Also, the algorithms still require some form of comparisons, just not pairwise comparisons.

> All other people live in the real world, and care about real-world performance, and modern computer scientists know that.

Yes, completely agree with that, but traditional "Comp Sci" is built on small building blocks of counting "comparisons" or "memory accesses". It's not designed to analyse prospective performance given modern processors with L1/L2/L3 caches, branch prediction, SIMD instructions, etc.