The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time.
It's weird how many people there are like that still.
But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
Probably to try to assuage people who already saw this story circulating: https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-t...