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Yup, "has a" vs "is a". From my experience in gamedev the former is a lot more common than the latter.

Had an engine where each entity could only have one mesh object since it was a part of the base entity type rather than a component. Led to a lot of multi-entity shenanigans that were brutal from a sync/off-by-one-frame perspective.

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Might be wrong here, but isn’t that also a limitation for most component column based ECS implementations? (I mean each entity can have only one instance of each component)

Depends on the ECS, most systems I've worked in will let you do two addComponent calls of the same type and then they'd just get added to the array of components to batch process. This is really common for mesh components (although there's usually mechanisms to specify dependency/ordering to avoid off by one frame issues).

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