Is cutting EQ scientifically different than boosting EQ?
There is a very compelling reason for preferring cutting over boosting. Assuming you are using the typical bell-response parametric EQ bands, then you will see a significant phase distortion around the resonant frequency, i.e. the frequency you're boosting or attenuating. (There is an exception to this rule: Linear phase EQs that are often used for mastering do not show this phenomenon. Those only exist as digital implementations however and have other problems.)

The most noticable effect of the phase distortion is that it comes with a certain group delay around the resonant frequency, and especially narrow changes can result in audible post-ringing and temporal distortion of transients.

Now if you're boosting what you want to hear more, you introduce this kind of problem exactly in the band that you want to give more prominence. Cutting also introduces the same issues, but you usually cut what you don't want to hear as prominently. So cutting will move the phase artefacts to the sonically less important frequency range while boosting will place it right where you don't want it.

That's the theory at least. In practice, the rule can be relaxed in most cases. The negative effects of resonant phase distortion greatly depend on the derivative of the phase response with respect to the frequency. That means that resonances with very small bandwidth will result in greater issues than wide band resonances. And this is absolute bandwidth, not relative bandwidth. This means for a typical EQ band that has a bandwidth proportional to the center frequency ("constant-Q filter"), the bandwidth automatically gets larger for higher frequencies.

So a bell EQ at a few kHz will have a large bandwidth, even if it has a rather high resonance. Therefore cutting vs boosting doesn't make a huge difference for higher frequencies. It does however get relevant for frequencies in the lower mid and the bass range, especially when you're using high Q-factors.