Workflow and practicalities dictate the winner of the cab/IR debate for me.
If I can make lots of noise, I'll pick one of my cabs every time. Miking it up, finding the right spot for the mic(/s), and dialing in a tone might take 10 minutes of messing around but it's fun and then I get cracking. But this is with my cabs, where I chose them, chose the speakers, have worked over time to get the gear I want.
If I can't make lots of noise, IR obviously wins and great tones are easy to achieve. But I have regularly fallen down the "Which IR" rabbit hole, auditioning hundreds of choices, and that feels a lot less wholesome than picking a mic and placement.
About the inconsistencies between speakers... some speakers make life easier or harder, but there's a fairly big range of acceptable tone because whatever filter the speaker's putting on the final sound, you're adjusting the amp to make it sound good to you that day. A dark and middy speaker might lose in an A/B test, but in real life you'd turn up the treble, turn down the mids, and maybe you end up with a better sound because the amp likes that? Or maybe not.
