Office 365 – SharePoint Online – Column formatting arriving

Today, I noticed in the Message Center an interesting new feature about Column Formatting that will arrive very soon in First Release tenants.

The example give by Microsoft shows a standard modern list:

and a list with column formatting:

This is nice of course, but it does make me ask is this the same as the SPFx extensions?

Apparently the new feature is to be rolled out at the end of October, so I’m interested to see if Microsoft has made the SPFx extensions available to end users or if there are two teams developing similar solutions?