The updated plans are independent of AT, an episode of the podcast covered that and Jonathan was explicit that the updated plans are better and do not require AT.
This thread:
has a very long first post, and a convenient bookmark that will take you to the Updated Plans FAQ.
If you ignore the marketing speak (and I’ll not be snarky), TrainerRoad has realized that making plans harder is not better, and they rebuilt the plans with smoother progressions and less hard work to improve consistency.
The previous SSB HV (my first TR plan in Dec 2017) looked like a mutant block periodization. In block periodization you do 5 hard workouts in week1, then weeks 2-4 you do only 1 hard workout (plus easy workouts). In the previous SSB HV you do 5 hard workouts a week for 5 weeks, with no corresponding 15 week deload 