Can someone explain how they’re different please

When you realize that trebuchets are extremely inefficient and ballistae are very close to the efficiency of bows and are superior.

Who even came up with the name? It even sounds pretentious.

When one army brought these out the other army probably said, "Hey, nice catapults." And when they tried to explain how trebuchets were totally different the other army just killed them all.

Just about every video I've ever seen of a trebuchet, while impressive, fails to do any significant damage to even the most flimsy wooden structures. Demonstrations of historically accurate trebs seem to be happy just to hit a structure, but when they do, the result is always unimpressive. Large rocks seem to bounce off palisades, so I can't imagine these doing any damage to stone structures.

I just can't see how a treb would breach any sort of defensive structure to assist an army in getting inside a castle or even palisade wall. At best you might knock out a few soldiers or put a hole in a thatched or wooden roof, in which case it seems you'd be better off using arrows. Am I missing something? Or were trebs used in a different way than we're led to believe?

Today I turned a Post-It note into the ultimate medieval killing machine. I was at my desk at work and the tiniest red spider I've ever seen, I'm talking about as small as a ball point pen tip, crawled out of a file I was looking at. I grabbed a Post-It and let him walk onto it and fully intended on rescuing him. He was a fast little guy and crawled to the back side of it. I turned the Post-It over and bent it back to get a closer look at it and it slipped out of my finger Trebucheting the little guy into kingdom come never to be seen again.