Besides the things people have already commented, two points:

  Your "true" area light is not a true area light. It's a grid of point
lights, which is a completely different thing.

  There *is* a major difference between area_lights and grids of point
lights: The area_light calculations are done *only* for shadow testing.
Nothing else. For any other purpose an area_light is a point light and
nothing more. (I'm not saying that this is a good thing; I'm just stating
the fact.)
  (Ok, photons is another place where area_light makes a difference if
configured to do so, but that's another different issue.)

  By the way, I don't like your attitude at pointing at area_light "defects"
which are simply caused because you used an adaptive value which was too low
or too low dimensions. The documentation is quite clear about this: It
explains in full detail what does 'adaptive' do and what happens if it's too
low.
  Since that is an artifact which is to be expected from a too low adaptive
value and this is clearly explained in the documentation along with a simple
solution (ie. use a larger adaptive value and if that's not enough, increase
the dimensions of the area light), it's unfair that you speak of it as if it
was a defect.

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

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