It is indeed very similar. Talos does a few things differently. The biggest being that it does not allow any host-level access and exposes a gRPC API for things like querying the processes, or restarting a node.
I am not sure what exactly you mean by “does not allow host level access”, the benefit of linuxkit is you can configure the software that needs to run in the root namespace, or not, aside from every process generally having a mount namespace.
The real benefit (imo) of LinuxKit is the familiar declarative manifest model for image definition, and container configuration. As a by product, it’s really straight forward to have reproducible builds.