I could be wrong, but QuickTime has the option to do screen recording of MacOS as well as connected iOS devices like iPads and iPhones. Because WWDC was pre-recorded, I would assume it was a shortcut to open QuickTime and quickly record their screens for the presentation.
I don't know why they didn't just open QuickTime directly though. My personal opinion is that the menu entry may have been there for quite a while in internal demo releases, but had its functionality tweaked last minute to open QuickTime instead of doing the mirroring it normally would have done at previous WWDC conferences.