Does anyone know if this means anything significant in regards to LXD?
LXD is more like KVM in that gives you "guests" that feel like a full OS. You can run existing apps in there in exactly the same way you would run them in a VM.
So these are two counterparts in the container continuum, and it's useful to understand them both so you use the right thing at the right time.
LXC is based on cgroups and kernel namespaces - the exact same things that enable Docker-based containers. LXD and Docker engine are competing "container"-based virtualization engines.
LXC can can be run as app-based containers just like Docker. This is what lxc-execute does. You don't have to run init as pid 1 in LXC.
By the way "Cloud-native" is little more than a marketing term.