Most developers know WireGuard as a VPN tool. Fewer know it as a lightweight, stateless cryptographic protocol you can use as a drop-in encryption layer for any UDP application — no VPN required.
This is almost true, but not quite. WireGuard is a protocol, but it's also the Linux kernel implementation of that protocol; there are design decisions in the protocol that specifically support software security goals of the kernel implementation. For instance, it's designed to be possible to implement WireGuard without demand dynamic allocation.