Host-based firewalls are, indeed, fake firewalls, and it's unfortunate that they chose to use the same term for functions that superficially look like they do the same thing, but are way less effective, and encourage bad network design.

The classic architecture for security was: edge router -> firewall -> DMZ -> bastion -> DMZ -> office router

You could put more firewalls, and switches and stuff, in there, but it is really important to have a bastion host as a chokepoint in the DMZ. You could have an IPS doing this instead. Or you could have a proxy server such as SOCKS.

But your firewall is pretty far away from any host that could get bright ideas about messing with it. (Because it is possible for client hosts to mess with router "firewall" settings via UPnP.)

This collapsing of topology also happens with other stuff, like NIDS/HIDS intrusion detection. Yeah, IDS can be more effective in certain ways when it has access to host-based logs and resources. But it's different than an isolated IDS listening on a TAP/SPAN where nobody logs into it and doomscrolls Facebook.