How is that at all like Itanium except for the superficial headline level where people say they are hard to program?

Because the main feature that made Itanium hard to program for was its explicit instruction-level parallelism.

They weren't talking about instruction level parallelism.

Similarities between two things don't require them to be identical.

They aren't similar, they couldn't be more different. One is about lots of small threads of execution communicating with each other and synchronizing, one is about a few instructions being able to be run in parallel because implicitly within the CPU there are different pipelines.

They aren't just different, they are at completely opposite ends of the programming spectrum. There are literally the two extremes of trying to make throughput faster.