I think most presidents are usually puppets of their advisors and staff. How else could it be? A president can't possibly be an expert in all the domains they have to work in, so they generally rely on advisors to tell them what they should do. Maybe the advisors present a set of choices and let the president pick the one he likes the most, but even then the advisors have a lot of power when they decide which options to present and how to present them.
I think it's not that black and white. Biden has been a senator and a vice-president. Of course he's not an expert in everything but he knows his party's lines and positions well enough to know the general direction he wants to stir the ship without knowing how to weld that pesky loose rivet on third deck.
I don't know when the term puppet was ever more appropriate than for Bush under Dick Cheney. (And then, only in certain policy areas).
Unless the thing that qualifies someone for being the joe biden of $country is just winning against the trump figure of said country that makes absolutely no sense. Can't even begin to think about any similarities you'd see between biden and lula to preemptively address.
Biden is a good deal more coherent than Trump ever was, but it's still bizarre how much of a gerontocracy the US is.
Biden is not senile, but superficially there are similarities.
Biden and Lula were already established politicians from the highest offices and they made/are making comebacks as sort of old but popular candidates for their parties. Both being the opposite of fresh faces in politics. Running on old merits.