The domain name is haiku-os.org. Every page includes an "About" link at the top, and the root page has a two-sentence description in a large font at the top.

They really couldn't make it any easier to figure out what Haiku is.

The news release doesn't show a thing about what it is nor is there a link.

The URL with an OS in the name tells me what category it is in but not the USP (I don't really get that from the two sentences either but at least it's something)

So I went looking (not via Home or About because usually they are useless, YMMV) but via Documents.

So here I am, saying that it took me a while to figure out what it was.

There is no USP really... it's an OpenSource reimplementation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS (before your time?). Haiku has been around in some guise or other since the early 2000's.

BeOS was/is pervasively threaded and took full advantage of multiple cores (a very novel thing when it came out - BeBox had two PPC processors).

Similar projects include: ReactOS (Windows 2000), AROS (AmigaOS), FreeDOS (MS-DOS), FreeMiNT (Atari ST). I think there might even be one for OS/2

For all intents and purposes, if you had no exposure to BeOS, you won't really get why this project exists.

It is so crazy to think that we could be living in a completely different world today had Apple opted to acquire BeOS instead of NeXT.

I suspect Apple would have struggled to attract the amount of developers they did, by moving to a non-unix systems; which in turn might have hampered their efforts on mobile.

Well the bigger impact is that Steve Jobs may not have ever returned to Apple.

Wait, are you saying you wondered what this project is and you saw the "About" link at the top and decided not to click it? About pages are indeed useless if no one visits them.