There's no major announcement here (compared to what Airbus has been saying for the last few years). Airbus continues to believe that propfans/open rotor designs are worth testing for their next generation design.

As noted in the article, such a design would likely require rear-fuselage mounted engines, or high wings (either shoulder mounted or gull shaped)

What seems interesting to me is that Boeing's "next gen" bet seems to revolve around truss braced wings, which seem to also require shoulder mounted wings. I wonder how well these two features would interact with each other.