This is space opera in the sense of being about a grand sweep of imagined history.

You probably wouldn't start the series here. If you did you would miss some references to previous books, but the book would overall make sense.

One nice thing about the Revelation space books is that the "sufficiently advanced technology a.k.a. magic" is about working around the limitations of physics, not pretending they don't exist. That means that there is consequences for travel across long distances, which gives the book a kind of "Homeric voyage" texture.