I’ve never heard of that phrase, but I like abject oriented programming. In this case, they’re using the concept of inheritance, but with assets:

Inheritance is a way to retain features of old code in newer code. The programmer derives from an existing function or block of code by making a copy of the code, then making changes to the copy. The derived code is often specialized by adding features not implemented in the original. In this way the old code is retained but the new code inherits from it.