I read that as AR development having more in common with game development, which makes sense given the emphasis on performance, 3D rendering, and latency.
Yeah, I should have said it could benefit from using a fully-fledged game engine, considering you'll likely need to import 3D models, have objects interact with each other, and so on which Unity would help a lot with.
However, I primarily do experimental work in those engines, so I'm pretty biased.
VR also has a ton of non-game use cases. This is one of the biggest issues with VR marketing. But yes, as other commenters have mentioned, AR development still benefits from using a game engine (maybe rebranding 3D application framework would make it more palatable to "serious app developers") because you probably want do work with 3D models\rendering.