> The table indicates mysqli does not support prepared statements.
*Client-side* statements.

Client-side statements are what PDO's emulated prepares are: an API that makes it look to the developer like they're working with prepared statements, with placeholders and bindings and all that, except what actually happens internally is that it builds the query as a string and sends it to the server as a normal (un-prepared) query.

And mysqli doesn't do that. It doesn't have a way to toggle between whether the statement is prepared on the server or "prepared" on the client. It only does the regular server-side prepared statements. Which is totally okay.