What is the exact difference between 'tty' and a 'console'?
The console is your physical computer and the various tty are virtual terminals.
Each tab or window of a terminal emulator like iTerm2.app or Terminal.app will connect to a different tty. MacOS works the same as this quote from one of the answers on your linked question:
So when you look to a "text window" on your linux system (under X11) you are looking to: a terminal emulator, connected to a virtual terminal, identified by a tty file, inside which runs a shell.
It is more clear what is happening if you run who with who -a
(to show all details) and if you also use the tty command (which returns the current terminal).
An example
Here I rebooted at 13:20, left it on the FileVault password entry screen until 13:25 then opened a Terminal.app session at 13:29.
Last login: Fri Dec 6 13:25:54 on console
A1398% tty
/dev/ttys000
A1398%
You can see the last logon was 13:25:54 on console (when FileVault unlocked startup disk) and Terminal.app is running on /dev/ttys000.
Next at 13:30 opened a iTerm2.app session:
Last login: Fri Dec 6 13:29:06 on ttys000
A1398% tty
/dev/ttys001
A1398% who -a
reboot ~ Dec 6 13:25 . 1
hali console Dec 6 13:25 00:04 97
hali ttys000 Dec 6 13:29 00:01 577
hali ttys001 Dec 6 13:30 . 600
. run-level 3
A1398%
You can see the last logon is shown to be 13:29:06 on ttys000 (when Terminal.app was opened) and iTerm2.app connected at 13:30 to /dev/ttys001.
who -a
shows
- console connecting at 13:25 (when password was entered and FileVault unlocked startup disk).
- ttys000 connecting at 13:29 (when Terminal.app was opened).
- ttys001 connecting at 13:30 (when this session of iTerm2 was opened).
If you boot into single user mode and type tty
you will see the result /dev/console
(who
is not available)