What is NGROK for
Blue Iris?
NGROK is a third-party service that creates a network tunnel between your computer (running Blue Iris) and the NGROK cloud service in order to expose your Blue Iris web server to the internet. It is a substitute for port forwarding designed for internet connections where IPv4 port forwarding is not available (most newer ISPs and cellular providers).
NGROK has a free usage tier where the main limitation you'd be concerned with is that it only allows 1 gigabyte of network bandwidth per month which you could exhaust in as little as about 17 minutes of remote viewing at "4K" quality. Or a few hours at a lower quality.
What is the benefits vs something like open vpn etc.
Easier to set up. The downside is it is not really any more secure than port forwarding; e.g. if a vulnerability is discovered in Blue Iris's web server, it will most likely be exploitable by a hacker through the NGROK tunnel.
However NGROK does apparently support injecting an authentication step in order to be able to connect to the tunneled service, so that would more or less solve the issue of being less secure than a VPN.
Is there an updated setup guide?
Not that I'm aware of. It should be pretty simple. Register an NGROK account, find the "auth token", and paste it into Blue Iris's web server configuration. Then NGROK somewhere should give you a link you can use to connect to Blue Iris.