Don't take my word for it, but I don't believe this is anything new.
I think this is just referring to the difficulty settings now simply being slider pre-sets. Notice in the current Madden games if you change any slider at all after having set it to, say, All-Pro, the difficulty title changes to "Custom".
I think this was originally done in Madden 12? Possibly Madden 10, foggy. Was definitely present in 13 and 25.
Again, I could be completely wrong, but that's my interpretation.