Parquet also encodes the physical layout using footers [1], as does ORC [2]. Perhaps the author meant support for semi-structured data, like the spans you mention.
Yeah we should be more clear in our description about how our footers differ from Parquet. Parquet is a bit more prescriptive; for example, it requires row groups which are not required by Vortex. If you have a column with huge values and another column of 8 bit ints, they can be paged separately, if you like.