RAW is whatever you want to make it. Tell your own story, why not
JPEG is a rendered photograph and RAW is camera data. You’re never actually looking at a RAW file, but rather some software’s interpretation of a RAW file. You want to be shooting in RAW because it makes edits easier and non-destructive, and it results in higher-quality images. But every camera manufacturer has its own interpretation of RAW which has its own file format, and every camera has its own way of rendering RAW files.
For example, Nikon has “NEF”, while Fuji has “RAF”, which are two completely different file formats with their own attendant TLAs. When you process photos in software like Capture One or Lightroom, they rub this distinction out and call both “RAW,” even though they are not RAW. And also, each RAW format, which is not “RAW” but is in fact proprietary, frequently gets subtly updated from camera to camera as sensors get improved. You take a RAW file, process it, and export it to JPEG in that software.
This is not confusing at all and you understand completely.
Okay, so all of this matters only because you own a camera, and it is that camera, from that brand, and it has a specific way that it reacts to RAW. Some camera brands (Nikon, Camera) are broadly praised for their color reproduction; other camera brands (Fuji, Leica) are praised for their ability to work with highlights & shadows more easily.
If I, personally, have to choose between “renders color better” and “nails the exposure,” I will pick exposure every time. This is not a settled debate! Many people think I am flatly wrong about this! But I shoot a lot in the dark with a lot of point light sources, and those are notoriously difficult to get right on even the most sophisticated cameras as of press time.
I like my camera for many reasons, as stated, but one of the most underrated is twofold: their RAW format’s ability to stretch exposure, and their ISO support. Both are related.
Reductively, there are five levers to manage exposure in post-processing: white, black, highlight, shadow, and exposure. Exposure handles everything. Highlight & shadow handle the rendering of dark or bright grays. And white & black do what you think they will, mostly addressing blown-out points on the image. Having forgiving raw that allows you to mess with exposure more generously allows you to deliberately underexpose your images and fix them in post. So does the ability to support high ISO as well as my camera’s (large) sensor does without getting too much noise. So you can run your shutter for less time at high ISO, and you end up with an image that is perceptually some form of “good.”
And that’s what’s sort of wild about RAW: that “good” is still so subjective. People go out, shoot in the wild, compare cameras, and still some people find one form of an image to be “pleasing” or “good” over another. The algorithm inside the black box becomes a school of thought, forcing you into a certain habit, and this is how you learn.