Well.. they also advertise it as the ultimate ‘amp in the room’ experience. In my experience, it not that great at giving you that experience.
So for people who’d expect it to be totally amp in the room like: you’d better get a good solid state power amp (like the Matrix) and use a real guitar cab or two. Cab sims turned off, of course.
Your comparison is a lot closer than a lot I've seen....where people try to compare a cab to running through their studio monitors set up for stereo monitoring. That will never sound like a cab in the room...and the better your room is, the weirder it'll sound.
And I firmly believe that if you like this, you like this. But the mono vs stereo is actually a big deal. The FRFRs are just speakers. I've done stereo and wet/dry with FRFR speakers....and it's always harder to set up 2 speakers than it is to set up one. People really discount the acoustic effects of running speakers like this.
FWIW, I also don't quite understand how people deal with those issues from running multiple cabs. Every time I've tried, unless one of them is kill-dry/wet-only, I wind up moving them around the room an inch or so at a time and flipping phase to get the bass and the high-end to sound right. It's simpler to just not use stereo and deal with wet+dry summing in electronics rather than in the room. But...that's also just my preference.
IME, almost any single speaker run correctly (more or less like you did) sounds like a guitar cab. But to really do a direct A/B, you have to compare 1-to-1 or 2-to-2 and have them physically in the same place....which is a huge PITA.
I'm pretty sure it was JBL that did some research with something like that for hi-fi speakers where they had them all on a big turntable so they could keep the placement the same, and the whole thing was behind an acoustically neutral screen so the listeners couldn't see the speakers they were listening to.....I don't remember what they were testing or what their results were, but IMO those are the ridiculous lengths you have to go to in order to actually do apples-to-apples comparisons between speakers.
Or just use whatever you like and accept that you might like one thing over another due to some variable you didn't control for rather than because of real differences between them.