In most commercial software you can create a sketch, draw a shape, extrude it out, cut some holes in it and it stores it in an ordered tree. You can go back and change the first sketch and it’ll go back through and update the resulting model. If you export that as an open format you only get the result of all those steps - you lose the instructions the software uses to create them.
You can do other things like have parameters. You could make a sketch and have dimensions defined by a statement dim2 = dim1 * 5 sort of thing. When you update dim1, it would also update dim2.
I don’t know where OpenSCAD fits in here. I should play with it a bit. I suspect scripts can be written to behave very similarly.
There’s also a lot of other shit crammed into commercial formats - materials, drawings, stress analysis and other shit we wouldn’t normally need.