Meteors entering into (and burning up in) the Earth's atmosphere typically have initial velocities of 30 km/s. The ISS, in contrast, orbits at a velocity of a mere 8 km/s. When a fragment of "space junk" is jettisoned from the ISS, it is thus traveling at a much lower speed, resulting in less degradation as it falls.
Regards,
I have sitting in my office at my house a smooth black rock, clearly iron or metal of some kind, that popped through the roof of our horse barn. About the size of a baseball.
No big smoking crater. Wasn’t hot to the touch. No crater of any kind, really.
Just a loud bang and a pretty good sized hole through the 1X4s that make up the roof.
Despite the lack of dramatic entry, I’ve always assumed it was a meteor. Maybe it was space junk.