Is storefront filtering worse than tag filtering for SEO?

[froystore]

It seems that the storefront filtering, although more convenient than managing tags, is awful for SEO.

With traditional tag filtering, you get URLs like below for a rugs collection filtered for both color "blue" and material "cotton":

https://[brand].com/collections/area-rugs/blue+cotton

This sort of URL is very human-readable and looks like what Google wants. You can see that the first page Google results for major retailers have the following URLs:

https://www.wayfair.com/rugs/sb2/blue-cotton-area-rugs-c215386-a1244~2135-a1247~129800.html
https://www.homedepot.com/b/Flooring-Rugs-Area-Rugs/Blue/Cotton/N-5yc1vZarjgZ1z0vi5dZ1z187k6
https://www.macys.com/shop/b/cotton-rugs/Color_normal/Blue?id=108171

You can see that for major retailers, their ranked URLs look very similar to Shopify's tag-based filter URLs. The filtered tag terms "blue" and "cotton" appear either as a subdirectory or appended in front of the collection/category name "area-rugs".

The tag-based filters also have canonical URLs for these pages. So tag filtering makes ranking easy, especially if you can make some code edits so filtered tags have unified canonicals even for multiple tags (ex., "/blue+cotton" and "/cotton+blue" both point to "/blue+cotton") and dynamically generated H1 tags and descriptions.

Storefront filters, but contrast, produce very long/ugly URLs like below:

https://[brand].com/collections/area-rugs?filter.v.price.gte=&filter.v.price.lte=&filter.p.m.custom.color=Blue&filter.p.m.custom.material=Cotton&sort_by=price-ascending

To make matters worse, it does not appear any of the filtered results using faceted filters have a canonical URL. The canonical is always just the base collection URL. Therefore, I don't think you'll rank for any filtered collections. The URL is just a bunch of URL parameters/query strings.

We are just diving into storefront filters, so please provide insights you have with SEO advantages of both filter systems. We like the ease of managing the filters using the new storefront filters, but it's all useless if it doesn't play nicely with SEO.