I thought it was worth noting, as I follow the CNCF and their numerous projects, but I hadn't made the connection myself.
Not to take anything away from the accomplishments of the Quay team or their contribution, there is definitely value in having more than one kid on the block when it comes to open-source solutions for problems like this. I think the tendency is to push for "one solution to rule them all" and that kind of approach can stifle innovation pretty hard.
I'm not sure there's any relevance between this announcement and that one, as Harbor has been in the incubator since about 12 months ago from what I can tell, and was sandbox before that. But it appears to be another mature solution in the same space with many of the same features, if that isn't something worth noting I can't understand why not!
To your point, it would be great if the comment was a bit more substantive.
It was in a mostly stagnant state, a release once in a while, and now it's going regular and strong.
The thing is, after things get the "CNCF" stamp they kinda go viral and become the "de facto" standard.
This means that Harbor would become the most usual way to run a private registry and thus Quay would lose ground (=> harder to sell).
Source: just implemented Harbor at work. Quay would probably have been better (probably "production ready") but Harbor was free & open source.