Not a personal knock but I suspect that you picked up the idea that non-permeable materials condemned a wearer to being wet from sweat from Gortex advertising and that you are too young to have extensive experience wearing non-permeable gear, and how it can be managed to prevent moisture buildup.

Yes, non-permeable gear can mean you get and stay wet from sweat, and that moisture can defeat the insulation. But it doesn't have to be that way. People have been stomping around the north woods for thousands of years before Goretex. Long before VPMs, Vapor Permeable Membranes, people learned how to actively manage their ventilation. A popular term from a few decades ago was that you learn to actively "drive" your gear.

In this case maintaining an active awareness on how active you are, how active you're going to be, whether humidity inside the coat is starting to build, and doing something about it like working the openings, or removing layers, to avoid excess moisture buildup is a skill that has evidently been lost. Or at least forgotten about.

For a long time people have known how to actively work their clothes to prevent them from getting soaked with sweat. It takes effort, an effort people who wear VPMs need not expend so much of to stay comfortable, an effort that many people don't know to make, a situation that may cause them to fail to survive, but if the effort is made it can be as effective, even working with a $.50 trash bag.

VPM is to non-permeable outwear what ABS is to normal breaks. It is an improvement over the older technology but it does not invalidate the earlier technology. The old stuff still works quite well if you are willing to actively drive it. Goretex just does much of the driving for you by automatically controlling moisture levels.

I admit that VPM technology has improved over the last 40 years. It has got better and more reliable. There's scarcely a mountaineer or explorer who doesn't use some of it. Even the US military, as stodgy and conservative group as there ever was, has largely shifted to VPMs in their outerwear.

On the other hand commercial fishermen, construction workers, and loggers still use a high percentage of simple rubberized or plastic coated fabric. Grundigs is a mainstay, and it is made of simple and highly reliable cotton or polyester, heavily coated with PVC. It doesn't breath worth a damn so you have to handle the ventilation manually.