Yeah it comes down to confusion around the term mesh. Typically, a mesh network means the access points don’t need to be wired together to handle the backhaul traffic. Instead, they use a separate wireless signal to send traffic back to the router. Wiring the access points together is not really a mesh in that sense, though the clients still may only see one ssid even though they can hop access points when moving around the house.
Edit: I’m not a networking specialist so I could be way off here.
And in terms of the difference, I think the magic is in the amount of control you will get over the system using a pro-sumer setup from unifi or omada. I think the systems are designed to manage these things better.