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But how does it change the argument if there's one very peripheral or marginal reference to Vattel in a 400 page book?

If there were one marginal legal reference your point might have relevance. Besides John Jay, John Marshall, Joseph Story, ... Alexander Hamilton, in one of many letters to George Washington, this one on September 15, 1790, in which Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury was advising Washington, refers to the wisdom of the legal philosophers whose thoughts were the foundation of the new republic. Remember, this was a brand new nation, violently breaking from a monarchy/oligarchy with its centuries of arbitrary common law, including citizenship statutes which were often modified to address a specific problem with some member of the royal family. Hamililton ran down the opinions of the other great legal minds of the time, Pufendorf, Barbeyrac, Grotius and finished with an observation not controversial to Washington, upon whose desk in New York Vattel’s Law of Nations was the first reference:

But Vatel, perhaps the most accurate and approved of the writers on the laws of nations, preserves a mean between these different opinions.

According to Janis, the reason they relied mostly on Vattel was because he took all the others & put them all into treatises without regard to specific religions. Pufendorf, Locke, Sidney & the others are laced with references to Christianity as well as laced with quotes from the bible. Vattel wrote his treatises for all nations regardless of religious beliefs, therefore all nations, whether christian or no would understand the general principles of the different forms of govt & the laws common to all of them in order to promote the ease of international commerce & growing emigration. You may have seen obot drones referring to Hobbs, but that is a smoke screen. Hobbs was an outright athiest & had great influences in writing the feudal law, especially the doctrine of perpetual allegiance just because you happened to be born on a particular piece of real estate.