Basically, it was a way to get a developer to do more testing during development before handing over a feature to QA. This sets up the imagined possibility of firing all QA staff and having developers write perfect code that never needs to be tested thoroughly. Looks great on paper...
At a previous company, they started firing all of the manual QA devs and replacing them with offshore QA people who could do automated testing development (Cypress tests). The only problem was that those fired QA team members had significant business domain knowledge that never was transferred or written down. The result was a dumpster fire every week, with the usual offshore nightmares and panicked responses.
Make no mistake about this, it's just a cost-cutting measure with an impact that is rarely felt immediately by management. I've worked with stellar manual QA people and our effort resulted in bulletproof software that handled edge cases, legacy customers, API versions, etc. Without these people, your software eventually becomes IT-IS-WHAT-IT-IS and your position is always threatened due to the lack of quality controls.