You may read this thread @DoR3M3 : Advanced Privacy - know all about it
(easy to be found via “advanced privacy” in forum search)
In the first post under “side effects” of “hide my IP” it says:
The implementation of Orbot bridges all the devices’s Internet traffic through the Tor network. This was initially designed for VPN Services . That’s why Hide My IP appears as a VPN in /e/OS. We are working on another solution to route the devices’s traffic directly through Tor, to avoid this confusion.
This short section may not satisfy the expert but still sounds like the first bits of an answer to your initial question and it might be a good starting point for your discussion with devs in gitlab…
I am not an expert and I do not use the AP features but to my best knowledge and understanding AP simply makes use of the VPN-interface of the android-system to force all traffic into a specific direction (tor-service in this case …and given the “hide my ip” feature is activated).
This VPN-interface can also be used to connect to real VPN-services (that´s why it is stated that it was “initially designed for …”) or to e.g. control DNS-requests (more or less similar to what a pi-hole does - requires specific apps).
I presume the (your) confusion is about being led to believe a (real) VPN-service is active (or /e/ would pretend to include VPN-service) whereas the OS only indicates the VPN-interface of the phone is being used (to access the tor-network)…
edits: clarifications+typo