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What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.
I think there's some validity to it, but it's not in the muscles themselves.
Imagine you could run scans through my body to figure out exactly how muscled I am, down to the gram and square millimeter. A boxer with the "exact same" stats is still going to hit way harder because they have a massive advantage in more ephemeral elements, like muscle memory and training their body to work together in a certain way.
Just so with manual labor. I did it for years, and I can do the thing where I can heft up some enormous, heavy object and casually walk it a hundred yards. But the thing that lets me do that isn't exactly being strong. It's having an intuitive, pre-conceptual understanding of torque and leverage and balance and how they interact with my body.
I had an incident last week where a young, scrawny employee expressed some degree of being impressed at me raw carrying some large object. And I paused, holding it up with one arm, and explained that my arms really weren't doing much work. I was just holding it steady so that the center of mass was balanced over my shoulder and aligned with my core.
I think that's where the discrepancy comes from. It's not that one "type" of muscle is different from the other, but that you develop different suites of subconscious support skills from different activities.
I agree it's generally underestimated how much strength comes from the efficient, coordinated recruitment of muscles. I remember when I first started playing tennis my right arm got noticeably hypertrophied relative to the left side, probably because I was compensating for awful technique by muscling through the swing. Over time, as I improved my technique and smoothed out my kinetic chain (engaging legs and hip rotation), my right arm actually shrank down and now the asymmetry is barely noticeable. I hit much harder now than I did back then. I do think that muscle groups tend to require some training to contract in a synchronous manner that gives more power for a given muscle fiber density.
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