"Instructions" is probably the wrong word here (I was mostly trying to dumb it down for people who aren't familiar with graphics rendering terminology).
The idea is that it allows offloading more work to the GPU in ways that are much better performance-wise. It just requires that the hardware actually support it, which is why you basically need an RTX card for Alan Wake 2 (or whichever AMD GPU supports Mesh Shaders, I'm not as familiar with their cards).