Apparently Persona was even based on some prior work called "VerifiedEmailProtocol", eerily similar to the OP

The Verified Email Protocol got renamed to BrowserID, and Persona was its reference implementation.

This looks broadly similar to that, but with some newer primitives (SD-JWT) and a focus on autocomplete as an entrypoint to the flow. If I recall correctly, the entire JOSE suite (JWT, JWK, JWE, etc.) was still under active iteration while we were building Persona.

And hey, I applaud the effort. Persona got a lot of things right, and I still think we as an industry can do better than Passkeys.

For historic interest, the Persona After Action Report has a few key insights from when we spun down the project: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR