Yep, and Andrew Grant from Epic has since confirmed there are no plans to have a visual scripting language like Blueprints going forwards.

Verse is their stab at leveraging Fortnite to create a Roblox style Metaverse, where assets can be made using AI, and sold/remixed/reused across multiple online projects.

The networking framework is being standardized, simplified, and made modular to achive this.

Lots of people are calling it the death of Unreal Engine.

Metaverse First: Verse is designed for a future where code runs in a single global simulation—the metaverse. This influences every aspect of the language, from its strong compatibility guarantees to its effect system that tracks side effects and ensures safe concurrent execution. - Book of Verse

😕

As UE5 and UEFN merge into one editor, you will be able to ship traditional games and projects exactly as you do today. You’ll be able to ship directly in Fortnite, or ship to your own ecosystem, and optionally, make it compatible with ours. You’ll have an easy path from one to another.

Our philosophy through this transition is to bring existing projects along, not to force a hard break. Studios shipping on UE5 today should expect a manageable, and clear path forward when UE6 is ready for them. To allow for this, Actors and Blueprints will be in early versions of UE6. Eventually, these will be deprecated when the new framework is sufficiently mature, and you’ll have conversion tools to move projects from one framework to the other.

I'm surprised they're targeting a hard break. The goals seem to be platform onboarding, which can be considered an opposite goal to people who develop their own products.