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I made my own baby food. I started at 6 months with green beans , and then squash, oatmeal and now we are on carrots. You dont have to do rice cereal. Just start with something simple thats a good first food like avocado, squash, carrots, sweet potato, green beans or you can do fruit like banana

No, pediatricians are just in the habit of recommending rice cereal as a first food, since it was in the books for many years.
There isn't really good reasoning behind it, if you research it.

You don't need permission from your pediatrician to do anything, it's your child - if you've done the research and found that veggies are better, then by all means, feed those!

Our pediatrician said it's not necessary to do rice cereal first, the most important things are to know which foods can cause constipation and also to not introduce a new food for 3-4 days so you can watch for allergies.. We have started with pureed pears and now we're onto unsweetened applesauce. I may consider doing the rice cereal with bananas mixed in since the cereal by itself seems like it would be bland. My LO will be 5 months next week, we just started with these foods this past weekend.

We started at about 4.5 months and give LO something new to try every few days (well, more like once a week, just due to busy schedules for the past few weeks). We are not doing rice cereal, I don’t see the point and neither did my ped.

So far LO has tried: avocado, peas, bananas, sweet potato and carrots. LO liked all but the bananas.

I don't think you need permission to do anything. I would go with your original plan of 6 months and veggies, as there's really not much nutritional benefit to rice cereal.

Our ped said we could just skip cereal and go with veggies. We tried to wait until 6 months, but she all of a sudden was starving. We started a little after 5 months with sweet potatoes.

ETA: We do use oatmeal to give some of the store-bought purees a little more substance. They're quite runny, and we're hoping a thicker texture will help us transition to finger foods more quickly. If you make your own you can make them whatever texture you would like.

The only reason I can imagine that they still recommend rice cereal is that brown rice is hypoallergenic, but I don't plan on doing rice cereal at all. I'd rather introduce foods that have nutritional value and that I'll want to continue feeding her going forward. I don't think you need ped's permission to start with something else.