It would appear so....but I wonder if Vref+10 came about as a result of earlier experience and that was the source of the story?
I get what you mean about the height response at the cockpit vs flightpath response....but given that we're talking about landing, then it's the height of the undercarriage that matters.
FWIW, like all long-bodied aircraft, a last-minute pull has the capacity to drive the u/c into the ground harder because the pitch change happens before the flightpath change. That could well be exaggerated by 'negative elevator' effect.
A video of a landing could be quite telling if you could see the elevons - there's a very marked and increasing 'up' input to counter the pitch down from ground effect. I suspect that, in ground effect, this negative elevator effect would be swamped by all the other things that are happening.