Of course there are confirmations but the confirmations are instant and decentralized. The key is to attain global 0-confirmation consensus on local instant confirmations.
Hashing your own transactions gives you local instant confirmation. But once you submit these into a chain of work, the selection rule means you can still get orphans.
You are assuming the design is essentially the same as Bitcoin etc. It should be obvious from the numbered items in the OP (and later comments from ion.cash) that it is not. I suggest waiting for further details rather than pointless debates on the basis of no detailed information about how it claims to achieve those.