Todd is that you? This doesn't mean anything till we see it. The pops might be overly simplified and abstracted.
Guaranteed they are simplified at least somewhat. "Over a billion people are modeled individually" is pure horseshit unless they're absurdly simple and/or processing is spread out over many ticks. At the very least, they have pops with a quantity, which is fair enough, Vicky 2 did it that way, but that means "over a billion people are modeled individually" is a lie or at least a misrepresentation / exaggeration, and suggests other things may not be as claimed too.
This is probably the most controversial change they made tbh. So its going to be one culture per province like all their other titles?. Not a fan of this change it seems like a simplification.
I think what they mean here is that they're not, say, having a bunch of French cultures and grouping them into French culture group, the way EU4 does it. Instead my impression is that cultures will have a few member variables like spoken language and some membership of different culture "characteristics" (which, under the hood, may well just be culture groups, but perhaps a few different ones that can overlap, like Bretons belonging to a French group but also to a Celtic group and also to a Western European group, Arpitans belonging to a French group but also a Southern European group and maybe also an Alpine group) so that how "accepted" a culture is in a given country can have more granularity than just "yes or no", and you can represent the way that, for example, Occitans would probably be able to get along well enough in Italy, while Danes would not get along all that well, and Manchus not at all. It might not work that way, but that's my impression and hope.
Bureaucracy and Authority sound like mana. They claim they're not mana, but they were disputing the EUIV "mana" label for a long time, so those could end up being mana too. I hope they won't be.
It could be softcap such as administrative efficiency in Stellaris.
Hard or soft cap isn't really my concern, it's whether they're mana or not. To illustrate what I mean by mana, in EU4, bird mana is used for kulturkampf and also for researching new kinds of ship. It doesn't directly represent something. It's mana. If Bureaucracy is only used for buffing up your institutions, then it's not mana and I have no problem with it. If it's used for buffing up your institutions and the cost also varies based on the size of your country, I can also accept that. Small state is easier to administer, it's still representing your government bureaucracy's effectiveness. If Bureaucracy is used for buffing up your institutions and also to, say, integrate provinces into cores? Then it's getting into book mana territory.