The "FORMAT /S" MS-DOS command you're talking about doesn't write to the MBR. It writes to the partition's boot record and installs the absolute minimal files that MS-DOS needs to run (IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM). It does install a minimal version of "the specific OS".
To write the MBR for booting DOS, you'd use "FDISK /MBR" (or just create the partition table in FDISK on a completely blank disk). You can also install the minimal files without formatting using the "SYS" command.
When MS-DOS boots (from a hard drive), the MBR code checks the partition table for a bootable partition. It then transfers control to that partition's boot record, which then loads the aforementioned files. Both of these are about as primitive as it's possible to be; it's even required that IO.SYS be the first file on the partition and not be fragmented. MS-DOS's MBR can (and fairly commonly was, back when DOS was still relevant) be used to boot OSs other than MS-DOS; it's too primitive to care what it's actually loading, as long as it comes from the boot record of a "bootable" partition.
GRUB is a much more advanced bootloader. It's able to read the partition table, understand the filesystem within, load configuration, display a menu and load multiple different kinds of kernel (all this depends on the modules it's been configured with). As a result, it's much larger than the DOS MBR, but thankfully on modern(ish) systems there's (usually) a nearly 1MB "gap" between the MBR/partition table and the first actual partition and this is where GRUB puts most of its code. GRUB's MBR just transfers control to the code in the "gap".
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