The plan, IIUC, is to use PongoOS[0] as a bootloader which will then be able to load XNU/macOS or Linux. PongoOS already works on M1, so once the Linux support is done there will be a GRUB substitute.
(All those commands have good man pages.)
common BSD user vs. common Linux user
And in doing so it turns of SIP. Probably necessary to boot a non-Apple kernel, but it means if you do want to switch back to the Mac side you’ve got one of the main security mechanisms turned off.
Security settings are stored per partition, not per machine, so you can have a Linux partition where SIP is disabled and a macOS partition where it is not on the same machine.
I should add -- I don't know what most of these commands are. It would probably be helpful if they had spelled these out more, but this is all a great place to start.
bputil - Utility to precisely modify the security settings on Apple Silicon Macs.
csrutil - Configure System Integrity Protection (SIP)
kmutil - replaces kextload, kextunload, and other earlier tools for loading and managing kexts