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I almost mentally checked out, like I do when Rome is mentioned when discussing this. It's really more just reiterating old mythmaking rather than anything else: Westerners say they're like Romans so feel compelled to draw policy conclusions from Rome.
We have almost nothing to learn from a predominantly agrarian society whose main expense was the military in a time with much weaker state capacity and connection between various residents in a pre-nationalist age on assimilation.
There are so many differences I don't even want to start (not least that there is a difference between conquering a people that live in a cultural region you share and giving them broad latitude and importing a disembedded class that keeps a connection with the conservative and reactionary elements of its culture)
We absolutely don't and don't want to live in the world of Rome. We're going to live in it even less as automation continues.
Meh, I also dislike this "Muslims did tolerance, it's just the modern ones that're bad".
They were tolerant by medieval standards, before the concept of the modern state, the nation-state and the idea of universal citizenship. What of it?
Dhimmi were still second class citizens. Or rather: Muslims were the real citizens and others paid to be residents. And faced significant limitations on them that arguably explained their eventual "assimilation" (something very difficult against Abrahamic faiths): some places would need approval to rebuild churches (guess how this can be abused). Muslims could marry up to 4 Christian women and hold an infinite amount of them as sex slaves. Christians could not marry Muslim women or take them as slaves. All kids were Muslim by default btw.
In that light, the "impressive" task of assimilating Christians seems less impressive. It has Great Replacement vibes more than anything.
You yourself note that this is a word game: nobody would consider this tolerant by modern standards. Imagine if Europeans tried to implement a system where Muslims could never be citizens until they converted and had to pay a poll tax? It might be better than what happened to the Moriscos but that's no standard.
As for modern Muslims being more intolerant: well, arguably modern Christians were also more intolerant (they certainly nearly wrecked their entire continent) before they burned it out of their system and decided on secularism.
Why? Increased state capacity + the washing away of old arrangements - in this case the modern nation + democracy means you have to treat all those People of the Book better which...well.... States now have way more ability to fuck around in local conditions so they do. When people actually get power in a democracy, they don't want to share it with minorities they distrust so they don't (more likely they just don't have a democracy at all, in these places)
If the fruits of modernity - greater connection, greater responsiveness, greater government capacity, greater importance of thoughts as opposed to muscle power - all cause problems for assimilation (or make the lack of assimilation* more important) old Islamic empires are an actual anti-model: we know it wouldn't work so why bother?
* It may simply have always been low except from the 10,000ft view.
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