It looks like the intention is to bootstrap from source using an absolute minimum of precompiled binaries.

For an average user I'd imagine this is mostly just intellectually interesting but it's potentially useful for distros to aggressively minimise the amount of unauditable code involved in their builds.

The GNU Mes project (mentioned in the article) seems to be part of general work in this direction: https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/

Which seems to be GUIX-driven: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/guix-further-reduces-boots...

And some funding has been provided to the author to help with this: https://nlnet.nl/project/GNUMes-RISCV/