It is different, though. There's now zero Nvidia proprietary code running in ring 0. Does it meaningfully get you closer to a "true" open source driver? Not really. Is it still a significant improvement though? Absolutely.

This also opens the door for any other kernel (like the BSD's) to speak to Nvidia's firmware without needing to do any reverse engineering. As well as gets Nvidia out of the way in terms of adopting new stacks like DRM-KMS. They are just no longer a blocker on that now since that's all handled by the now open source "shim" (which is still more than a shim)

Don't worry, they've achieved both their goals: lowered the maintenance costs by opening and mainlining the few kernel bits that depended on the constantly breaking kernel APIs and do not contain anything potentially interesting to competitors, and got lots of 'shills' (probably the wrong word but I don't know any better) who didn't look into it too deeply and now spread great news for free that Nvidia has fully opened their drivers and the famous Linus gesture not longer applies.

Its a step forwards for nouveau, because they can now use the same proprietary firmware (which is now redistributable) as the proprietary driver, which means they can get the same clock speeds as the proprietary driver.

Its a step backwards too, because the firmware is now signed and therefore unmodifiable, but that was a problem before the recent code release too.