The Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks in Lightroom are mostly spacial adjustments: they raise and lower exposure in areas. In that sense, they are most similar to the tone equalizer.
But, there is a second set of Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks in Lightroom, attached to the tone curve, which are tonal adjustments, like in Darktable’s RGB Tone Curve or the brilliance adjustments in Color Balance.
Replicating tonal adjustments is easy. Spacial is much more difficult, as there are various nuances to consider, such as the width of the tonal range that is affected, the amount of feathering, halo suppression, and many other parameters. They differ a lot between raw developers. And some even change behavior depending on the slider position: IIRC in Lightroom, the first 25% of whites is purely spacial, but beyond starts to lower the actual output white point.
In general, the (non-tone-curve) Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks behave in a scene-referred manner, and recover data from beyond white, but later stages can not. However, I noticed that Lightroom seems to leave some headroom beyond the white point that later stages can recover even though they are notionally display-referred. And while e.g. Lightroom’s contrast slider clearly affects both contrast and saturation (very display-referred), the Luma curve does not, and seems to internally transform into a linearized color space. It’s complicated, is what I’m saying.