I find that my confusion primarily arises from the utilization of "USD", an abbreviation denoting the United States Dollar which exists since 1792 :)

Oh, huh... Excellent point that hadn't even occurred to me!

I remember when Jobs was introducing later version of Next he was asked about lack of OpenGL support and replied that Next will use Pixar developed scene description 'something' (already had some early shaders, maybe used by renderman?). You could say Pixar has been preparing for this for almost 40 years :)

there it is https://allaboutstevejobs.com/videos/misc/nextstep_3_demo_19...

"one of the other things that we've done with NeXTSTEP release 3.0 is we've actually built in some three dimensional graphics. We have built in Pixar's RenderMan photorealistic rendering software, which can produce the most photorealistic rendered images from 3D models. In addition to that, we've built in some real time 3D graphics, interactive RenderMan. We've taken photorealistic RenderMan and made a version that will run interactively on the screen."

OpenUSD is Steve Jobs laughing from the grave, once again he got his way.