regarding the issue that sometimes iOS push notifications, although reported as successfully sent, do not actually reach the recipient:
is there, in theory, any difference in reliability when sending to a topic instead of directly to a device token?
The report you get on the server side means that the request has reached Firebase servers successfully. It doesn't tell you whether the message was actually delivered.
I don't see any reason for them to behave differently. Handling tokens is more challenging as they are changed quite often and you need to monitor these changes.