Examples for us less educated folk?

Analogy "it's not GAN, it's transformer!" - - "it's not a recursive implementation, it's object oriented!" if you are more familiar with CS.

Or "it's not 4-wheel-drive, it's diesel!", if familiar with cars.

Jiang et al. (2021) TransGAN: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3540261.3541391

In general probably not much of a stretch to get rid of convolutions or recurrence by replacing with attention and see if it works hence the title of the original transformers paper.