What is downstream port PCIe switch bifurcation?

The NVIDIA Bluefield-3 spec sheet lists the following as its PCIe spec:

32 lanes of PCIe Gen 5.0
PCIe switch bi-furcation of up to 16 downstream ports

Would this mean the device can run on anything in between PCIe 5 x2 port and PCIe 5 x32 port?

I thought PCIe switch bi-furcation meant splitting a port into multiple ports. For example, bifurcating x16 slot would result in two x8 slots.

What does it mean that a PCIe device supports “bifurcation”.