Its more that the whole operating system was better for creative tasks, from font management to color management, as you touch upon, then the software started building on that.

The Studio XDR display is not a replacement for a reference monitor and Apple ended up back pedalling on claiming it was. I don't know why you think what it looks like matters, or the size as they are a professional tools.

I used Photoshop on Irix running on an SGI, and the SGI back in the day was way more powerful than anything Apple produced for serious tasks (not sure it was a better Photoshop machine though).