Note that, reserving an entire value (as a stateless start byte) means you need to escape that value anywhere in your payload, annoying for binary data. If you ignore it during a payload, then you're susceptible to erroneous payload length values and packet lengths.
(I'm not sure if that's what you had in mind.)
Sync could also be like a TCP sequence value, which always increments (or whatever) from packet to packet, rejecting unexpected values. With enough bits, it's extremely unlikely that random trash is received as valid data. Though the data itself can also get rejected, or out of sync, so you need everything else TCP has: open, close, SYN/ACK, request data again, etc.
Which, is certainly something you can do, just slap TCP on top of a serial port, I forget what that's called but it's well enough known, back when that was a thing.
Also not sure if that's what they meant or not... I'm no expert on networking, I avoid it when I can...
Tim