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Eink screens are reflective or a "front light" wouldn't work.
The outer surface of ANY display screen technology can be reflective or matte (glass, sapphire or plastic). A high resolution matte surface is more expensive.
An eink is only superior to a matte outer surface LED or OLED (that's adjusted properly) if the reflectance of the "white" is good enough for reading in ambient light. That only applies to colour eink in sunlight. Also, physics, all colour filters to make mono LCD or eink be in colour reduce the contrast ratio, because with same brightness of white the black will not be quite so dark.
Personally I'd only briefly use any screen in direct sunlight, a thing I avoid.
An eink front light doesn't at all be the same as ambient light. It's good when there isn't enough ambient light, so even with my mono eink I have enough ambient light to read any old paperback book which is plenty for mono ink with front light off. Physics says a perfect filter for colour on eink would reduce brightness to about 1/6th (R, G or B is 1/3rd, but light passes twice unlike LCD), but real primary colour filters are much worse. That's why Kaliedo 3 uses poor pastel shades, so the approximately 4000 shades (only 14 true grey, near white and black) are brighter but much more washed out than Triton, a filter for mono eink like an LCD filter, which as a result is very dark indeed.
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