I suppose it's sort of like a pasted strop, but the linen is fairly hard and stiff and at the same time the abrasive is a lot more gentle than aluminum oxide, iron oxide or chromium oxide (and by that much more gentle than diamonds). It's a bizarre feeling thing the first time you use it, makes a zipper sound and makes you feel sure it's ripping apart the bevel, but nothing happens other than that a little tiny bit of the residue is on the edge of the razor. You clean it off and go.

In terms of the rounding, some of that might be mitigated by the fact that the linen is very stiff, and also that it hardly removes anything. After 50 uses, it's not even gray, where as most of the more aggressive posts will be gray in one use. The last time I honed a razor, I used one that hadn't been honed in about four months (I only use one razor at a time, so that's basically 115 shaves or so) and a touch up was easy on a frictionite 825 (which is basically the fine side of a frictionite barber hone but in a bench stone size, it's not quite as aggressive as a modern 12,000 grit hone like a superstone, etc).

It's just much more sparing with the metal on a razor, basically, but not in a way that compromises its ability to keep a razor edge clean and sharp.

I personally think something has been lost between when those vintage loaded strops were made and now, but I've never seen anything about what's on them and what the underlying linen (without the loading) is like. The pro strop makers on here might know more. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that type of linen could make a razor last half a lifetime or a lifetime. The bismarck that I've been using for a year+ probably has 400 shaves on it and it has no visible wear of any type on any part of it. That's a big contract from when I started shaving and my razors got a light hone every one to two weeks.