I have a very different experience - here in Europe with 868 MHz MeshCore you get good singnal from a repeater through one or two city blocks with non ideal antenna placement.

With reasonable line of sight tens of kilometers & much more is doable. There are some repeaters on mountains that connect bigger regional meshes with packets going >100 km regularly.

https://mapa.meshcore.cz/

WCMesh in California covers a few hundred miles of southern California on Meshcore.... That isn't flat. It really just depends on buy-in in the local region.

Uhhhh ... No. You must have read that it uses the same frequency 900mhz, but did you actually try using it? When I first got on meshcore here NJ i immediately connected with my closest neighbor repeater 20 miles away which then in turn connected me to the local NJ/PA mesh which spans almost 200 miles wide. I don't recall any cordless telephone ever doing that...

I mean morse code on GMRS is actually an amazingly strong physics solution. Take the benefits of VHF propagation and combine it with high power limits and a coding scheme that is on par with FT8 for noisy channel resilience. No way a potato powered microwave is going to compete.

915 MHz mesh isn't a fair comparison. APRS is, but that requires licensing and unencrypted communication, so it gets less traffic. Quite good and fun though. I get point to point pings dozens of miles away daily.

it works incredibly well at Burning Man, so you are completely right!