The story is literally about Tesla buying 1.5B usd worth of it. Sure Elon has some interests in the direction but I doubt Tesla is going to use the bought Bitcoin for drugs.
For every point in 3d space you can get the distance to the surface. So, if you have a camera you can shoot a ray into the scene and pick some points on it to ask if it is inside the model. if so you paint that pixel with the surface material of the model. Then it's just a matter of picking a good way of sampling points along the camera ray. usually this distance function is some basic math (distance to sphere or so). But here they take a 3d mesh and create a neural network that can answer the question of distance to it (since meshes are very slow at that).
Often it has been that Vulkan is closer to how GPUs work simply due to GPU manufacturers having to change their GPUs to work well with Vulkan. To for example add a co-processor to the GPU so that it can do job scheduling in a more Vulkanish way.
Vulkan was after all a spec from one GPU manufacturer (AMD), there are a handfull others with their own archs developed with their own assumptions.