The basic idea is the same: use hot water to pull the flavors and whatnot out of some plant matter. So why pour water right through coffee grounds but let tea steep for several minutes?
In: Chemistry
If you use a tea-bag, you’ll see that steeping is actually pretty sharpish compared to steeping loose-leaf tea, and that has to come down to Surface Area To Volume.
If you grind up Anything it can dissolve faster than the non-ground up stuff because there’s more area on the surface of the particulates to interact with.
Coffee is ground before it’s poured out, and that, beyond exposing thr entirety of the bean and what’s inside, is also to increase its surface area so more of the coffee can get exposed to the water, it’s a pretty similar thing with bagged tea because bagged tea uses “dust”, basically instead of full leaves it uses finely chopped tea which resembles “dust”, hence the name.
With drip-coffee it’s pretty similar to strained tea, so your analogies aren’t far off.
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