@DaveD the main difference is that is about adding additional case tokens ontop of what core supplies where as this ticket / new PR etc is about extending where those tokens can be used, at the moment they are only available in PDF letters however this allows for them to be used in single emails when case id is supplied.
Closing this as it was merged - I found the PR https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/16105 & finding that is kinda helpful in understanding some of the confusing code I was hitting (ie. I had removed some but been too scared to remove some other parts because I didn't know what the impact could be)