What you're describing seems reasonable, but it doesn't align with what I quoted, unless I'm missing something, which I very well could be.
Having apps sleep and a daemon wake them to handle notifications doesn't require all of the notifications coming from Apple.
Not sure i understand. Sure it doesn’t require it but Apple doesn’t trust you to handle it because you’ll probably drain the battery or spam the user or whatever, that is Apple MO, putting themselves in the middle so they can control the experience.
The single persistent connection is just to receive pushes, there is still some daemon controlled by apple in charged of dispatching to correct app.