"I thought that IE switches had their own flavor of IOS?"
Virtually all Cisco product lines will have their own "flavor" of IOS, IOS-XE, or IOS-XR (I never worked enough with Nexus devices to include them here, but suspect they are the same). All product lines will start their software dev by branching off some platform-independent mainline called something like "iosdev" or "xrdev". Due to factors like market positioning, targeted price point, available hardware resources (CPU, RAM, NPU, TCAM, FPGA, etc), product management may decide that not all the PI functions available to them in their s/w branch will be actually be supported by the platform (ie, devtested). These same factors can drive product management to develop platform-dependent features for their product, to successfully position it in the market place. PD development, as the name suggests, is very much linked to the hardware of the platform itself, particularly the NPU & FPGA. This leads to product lines having a subset of all PI features available in IOS/XE/XR, but that feature subset is extended with a unique collection of PD functions. Hence, virtually every product line ends up with its own flavor of images that cannot be loaded into other product lines.
In theory, all IOS/XE/XR products that share the same release number can support the same PI features and syntax, but in practice that is not always the case (as everyone with more than one Cisco product type can verify).
Disclaimers: I am long in CSCO. Bad answers are my own fault as they are not AI generated.
