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There is a huge difference.

There is a huge difference. The sensel patterns have gaps in them that are interpreted by algorithms to produce the final image, and those demosaic/debayer patterns are subjective and vary from program to program. Some are proprietary and some are not, but those patterns are not part of the RAW data, but when the RAW data is baked into a tiff the results of those patterns is baked into the image thus a PNG will look the same from app to app.

If you want to see this in action install a copy of Rawtherapee, go to it's demosaicing panel and switch between it's various debayer algorithms. It's default is AMaZE, but it also offers AHD, LMMSE, DCB and several others. Each will produce a visually similar image out of the sensel data, but they will also be different at the pixel level because of how each interpolates the RAW data. Likewise some demosaicing/debayering algorithms can't be integrated into all software packages due to conflicts in their licensing. For example AMaZE, while open source, has provisions in it's licence that prevent it from being included with applications that are commercial. Thus if you like the result of AMaZE and want to use it in a given commercial app you must first bake that result at which point the image no longer RAW, but it can be PNG.