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.
Even quoted search is not representative because some ads just mention Vision Pro as one of the many products Apple is known for:
> "The Manufacturing Design team enables the mass production of Apple's entire product line from iPhones, iPads and MacBooks to the Mac Pro, AppleTV, Apple Watch and Vision Pro."
They don't care if their plans cause long term harm as long as they can cash out after the short term profits come in. As long as there are new companies/products to jump to and exploit next they're making money which is all they care about.
Then it would be outright lie to say "We started with a clean slate."