Yes, you will get secure direct connections. This matters for privacy in case of an encrypted chat, but also has a lot of benefits for more demanding use cases such as video streaming.

Here is a video of frando from our team demoing media over QUIC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3qqyu1mmGQ

If you use the default setup you are still depending on a tiny bit of cloud infrastructure such as our public relays to faciliate the hole punching. However, we also have optional local discovery using e.g. mDNS.