What I find a bit curious is that's a fully Chromium based browser, it's not simply based on the Blink rendering engine. So, it will be much closer (probably) to Chromium/Chrome than other blink-based browsers like Brave or Opera.

I'd really like to understand the rationale behind this choice. What they'd like to leverage from Chromium that Blink alone wouldn't have?

Opera and Brave are both chromium-based, rather than just using the blink engine. The official webdriver plugin for opera [1], published by opera, refers to their browser as "chromium based". The brave browser [2] is open source and you can see it syncs from Chromium

[1] https://github.com/operasoftware/operachromiumdriver

[2] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser