If I understand it right, those NDAs work as non-competes if “confidential” is defined as restricted just on the basis of some relationship to the business, which is pretty weird attack of legalese on common sense. Let’s say I used some relatively simple chain of thought to derive X about my job at Z. The fact that Z uses or does X is probably confidential, and that’s ok. This would be how I understood a broad definition. But what kind of reasoning would conclude that X is confidential per se, preventing me to use or do X elsewhere, effectively making doing my job impossible? It just doesn’t make sense.