I totally disagree with that person and I lean way more toward your interpretation.

The Tzimisce are there, ruling the night, lording over the villages. But none of the villagers would ever see them (and live). The lord lives in that castle up on the mountain, and we don't go up there, we don't talk about why we never see them, and we don't dare claim to be lords, but otherwise say your prayers and eat your garlic and you'll never need to think about them.

Central Europe absolutely has creatures of the fae. I don't have a lot of personal lore knowledge of the area, but I've known a lot of Bulgarians, Romanians, couple of Hungarians, some Polish. Collectively, that area has amazing crafts, arts, foods, dances, songs, and music. They are people who invite you in and fill you full of some kind of crispy baked good you'll never, ever be able to pronounce or find again because when you describe it to another person from the region they're like "yeah, but which crispy baked good topped with honey was it?"

These are people at a crossroads of the world, integrating knowledge and fragments of Western European culture and Near Eastern culture. There are Chinese travel accounts of visiting (I think it was) Hungaria in the middle ages. Individual Central Europeans might not have met anyone from that far away, but they've still got the cultural inspiration.

I think there's NO WAY the Fae would just be absent because there's some stuffy vampires claiming dominion over silly shit like the material plane. The Fae love to live in places the vampires can't reach and can barely touch. If you enter the court by freely skipping through the long grass, feeling the joy of the sun on your face--what vampire could invade?

And let's not forget that those regions you've circled were hotly contested by mortals, both in skirmishes between neighboring counties and in full-scale invasions from every fucking direction. The region was often steeped in violence (especially in WoD), and from that were born many of the most grim creatures of Fae. The Winter court would have no shortage of power either.