Yes their theory is that the protocol sucks for the client which is why they don’t use it. But they are really the only app doing that. They have managed to get market share by leveraging the nostr name and data and lots of marketing.
The tradeoff is that they are a platform that can go down, unlike pretty much every other real client. A better comparison would be to compare actual clients.
We are slowly converging to a similar network model, but it’s not spec’d by the protocol. It’s flexible on purpose since not every app would have the same network requirements on where stuff is fetched from. nostr is not just global microblogging, you could have setups that don’t even reach outside your corporate network.
