How is this different from the widely used ultrasonic sensors that hobbyist robots and like all modern vehicles use?

You know, at a cursory glance I also thought it was something tangentially golden shower related.

They already have that, basically. And they just introduced a way to recover from certain soft bricks wirelessly too, no doubt in preparation of dropping a port altogether with only MagSafe and standard Qi for charging. My guess is they’ll have a hidden port inside the sim slot for recovering from bricks at an Apple Store. This would be almost identical to the way they handle a firmware restore on Apple Watch and Apple TV 4K, with the former having a Lightning protocol port hidden in the band mount and the latter having a Lightning protocol port behind a door inside the Ethernet jack. I say Lightning “protocol” because while it’s not a Lightning connector, it won’t speak USB until enumerated by a Lightning chip like those found in an iPhones lower ribbon cable.