Squidge;
Top of the morning to you, I hope wherever this finds you that it finds you well.
As mentioned I spent much of my working life in the cabinet, furniture and finish carpentry business so unless my old eyes deceive me that's indeed hickory.
In particular I headed up the finishing department of our shop which had 3 separate spray booths and a Cattinaire automatic finishing machine for applying the clear conversion varnish to the doors and finished ends. At one point we were going through a 205 liter drum of clear daily in that machine just as a reference point.
When it first started becoming a thing up here in the late '90's, we were just coming out of the "pearl, peach, whitewash" era and as you noted, some folks thought they wanted clear coat only on their cabinets.
The recurring issue we'd run into however was that those folks too often had grown up with vinyl photo finish fake wood furniture and sincerely believed all trees were the same color. Then when they'd get the kitchen and the color wasn't uniform enough for their liking, they'd demand we replace the doors or worse the finished ends on the cabinets. Because we used integral finished ends in our product, not plant on finished ends, that meant tearing the box apart.
It became nettlesome enough that I developed what I dubbed "natural" stain which the sales crew subsequently sold a lot of, but it gave the wood a bit of a tonal blend - which made for less warranty work for our finishing crews.
When we did a major reno 20 years back, we put in hickory because by then I'd been about oaked and mapled to death.
Here's a shot of why we used PBC melamine for the boxes where we can see that in the run of cabinets there is only a single 5/8" filler which is a testament to the framing crew for sure as well.
Oh and yes we had a male cat who lived up there.
Here's another shot where one can sort of see how the blending stain worked on hickory.
Now for sure we did our best as well to color match the wood going into the doors, but as our waste factor on most raw wood coming in was close to 25% - and that was all species we did so red oak, eastern maple, fir, hickory, black walnut, cherry, alder, beech and pine - we had to get creative in order to stay in business.
Anyways again just a few random thoughts from a former life.
All the best.
Dwayne