A clean slate can mean anything, they chose AEGIS-256X2 because it can be hardware accelerated so its not exactly a clean slate if you use pre-existing tech in your stack. The line is drawn somewhere, and some giant somewhere is providing shoulders to stand on...

If they literally meant just the VPN layer then anyone with privacy/security in mind should pass since its proprietary and can never be reviewed for backdoors.

Anyway this article was written by AI so who knows how factually accurate it is.