My initial thought, reading your post, was he was using "canon" in a shorthand way to mean that it was Prime Universe, but then reading the tweet, I saw that using it in that way was redundant.
It's possible this writer doesn't know that Star Trek tie-ins are always and automatically non-canon. It's possible he's interpreting CBS Licensing approving the series as being more significant than it really is.
It's also possible CBS has finally wised up that it's 2022, other IP holders have expansive multimedia storytelling that spans both in-house and licensed products, media consumption is more fragmented than ever before, and treating licensee product as automatically dismissible does a disservice to their partners and the investments they're making.
The use of "dreaded c-word" is most likely ignorance or an overreading of the usual approvals process, but I really can't rule out a quiet policy change. Sure, I'd rate the odds of that quiet policy change as less than 3%, but again, it's 2022, and the entertainment landscape today is wildly different than it was when Richard Arnold defined canon.
