The auger is definitely different...
The hollow ones are definitely easier to make, and once you get chips-larger-than-pellets into them you can get bigger stuff to propagate to the burn pot, but the problem is getting the wood from the hopper
into the auger mechanism in the first place without jamming. If anything the hollow ones are worse at that if they have round edges that can't cut. (If you watch the last handful of pellets feed into these pellet machines, you'll often see one get sheared in two on the forward end of the feed.) Slicing through the occasionally errant piece is not so easy with chips, esp if they're heading in "cross-cut" instead of "rip".
I'd love to see how small you have to make chips to get them to reliably feed into either style auger. I'd love to try a bag, but not at the expense of having to repair an auger mechanism.
Some folks get fine smoke from just sawdust, but in general, I'm not sure smoking wood scales to small sizes without some flavor penalty. And I think that's why adding a split to a pile of embers in an offset may be inherently better than doing the same thing with wood splits the size of pellets in a can-size crucible. I'd love someone to make a pellet machine that has everything (pellets, augers, burn pots) scaled up by 3x. Even with good controls, the temp variation may be worse (like in an offset) but the smoke flavor could possibly be better. But that's a big ask. Pellet sizes got set by the heating fuel industry long before Traeger adopted the technology. A DIY guy could do just a large auger and burnpot and use normal chips instead of formed pellets, and that DIY guy could be me, but I just don't see how you get chips to feed reliably
into the auger and if you have to baby-sit the process, you might as well get an offset.