I guess you could interpret that as 'neo trad', though what the blogger linked earlier was calling neo trad seemed a bit more radical, as his interpretation of trad is more like what 2e does. His neo trad is like "players pretty much run things" which frankly I never got as being an intended mode of 5e. 4e, maybe, to a degree, but definitely not quite as he describes it there either (though I'm sure it could be drifted that way).
Here are what I take to be the key ideas in
that blog's description of OC/neo-trad:
The DM becomes a curator and facilitator who primarily works with material derived from other sources - publishers and players, in practice. OC culture has a different sense of what a "story" is, one that focuses on player aspirations and interests and their realisation as the best way to produce "fun" for the players.
This focus on realising player aspirations is what allows both the Wizard 20 casting Meteor Swarm to annihilate a foe and the people who are using D&D 5e to play out running their own restaurant to be part of a shared culture of play. . . .
Organised play ended up diminishing the power of the DM to shift authority onto rules texts, publishers, administrators, and really, to players. Since DMs may change from adventure to adventure but player characters endure, they become more important, with standard rules texts providing compatibility between game. DM discretion and invention become things that interfere with this intercompatibility, and thus depreciated. This is where the emphases on "RAW" and using only official material (but also the idea that if it's published it must be available at the table) come from - it undermines DM power and places that power in the hands of the PCs. . . .
OC styles are also particularly popular with online streaming games like Critical Role since when done well they produce games that are fairly easy to watch as television shows. The characters in the stream become aspirational figures that a fanbase develops parasocial relationships with and cheers on as they realise their "arcs".
There's some stuff in there one could quibble with - eg the reference to "power in the hands of the PCs" pretty clearly means "in the hands of the players"; and the emphasis on official material and "RAW" clearly has currency beyond organised play, probably reinforced by a broader sense in RPG hobby-dom that rules design is a real thing that professional designers might have done well.
Still, I think it points fairly clearly to an approach to play in which
players are very firmly in control of who their characters are and the GM's job is to provide a "stage" on which those characters can show themselves off (in virtue of player decisions about what they do and say).
An AP can serve as such a stage - a bit like superhero comics, the players show of their PCs somewhat orthogonally in relation to what is (at least on the surface) the "main action" of hacking through the dungeon or whatever. This is where the forgiving nature of challenges in 5e helps: the players and their PCs don't need to be all-consumed by trying to beat the GM's challenge.
Of course a custom-designed stage might do a better job. But I don't think it's the case in this style that the players "run things". In fact, and implicit I think in the whole idea of a player bringing their "OC" into someone else's world, it seems to me that the GM is expected to do a lot of work setting up the stage such that the players can portray their PCs upon it. This is an approach to GMing that I would associate with the idea of GM "burnout".
I know that setting up "litmus tests" for approaches to play is a fraught endeavour, but nevertheless I'll conjecture one: in neo-trad/OC play, if the character's goal is to (say) woo a princess, or (say) rule a castle, it is the GM's job to introduce a princess or a castle into the fiction such that the player can then bring their PC into the appropriate relationship to that story element.
Whereas in Burning Wheel, the player has tools to drive this themself: Circles and Wises. And if those checks
fail, then things with the princess or the castle may turn out very differently.
And in AW/DW, the player likewise has tools - Spout Lore/Read a Sitch/Read a Person, for instance. And again, if those checks fail, then the GM is invited to announce some sort of badness. "Moves snowball" is an official slogan in AW, and equally applicable I think not only to DW but to BW. And because of it, player-authored goals for their PCs, and player-authored self-understandings of their PCs (eg Belief: I will keep the Elven ways), are always up for grabs in the way you described upthread. Whereas in neo-trad play, moves don't snowballs and hence these player-authored elements of character are not up for grabs in the same way.
