Summary: We provide a synthetic yet comprehensive review of the so-called fourth moment criterion, and of universal limit theorems, for multilinear homogeneous sums, in both the classical and the free probability settings. In addition to such a general picture, we also prove a novel multidimensional transfer principle for central limit theorems involving homogeneous sums with leptokurtic or mesokurtic entries. The key step will be to prove that joint and component-wise convergence are indeed equivalent for these random objects, encompassing well-known results concerning Wiener and Wigner chaoses.