Yes, curves are a global adjustment while shadows/highlights are a local adjustment, it’s easier to recover more details with local adjustments but they could introduce artifact like haloes.
In the end it’s a matter of taste, generally I avoid using shadows/highlights because curves looks more natural to me, and I really would use the LAB color space only for sharpen, denoise or the hue-sat equalizer.
curves in RGB
same curve in LAB
