Moire is a repetitive pattern that shows up when two things that are constructed from many regular but discrete things are overlayed and misaligned. That made no sense so here is an example:
Take two window screens and overlay them. If the holes all line up it is like looking through one screen. If the two screens are overlayed 1/2 hole off, it is like looking through a screen that is twice as dense. If you rotate one screen just a tiny bit, a pattern is visible where some holes line up, some sort of line up and some are half blocked. The pattern shows up as "bands" of "dark" and "light." The number of bands increases as you further twist the screens. This pattern is a moire.
The pattern that shows up on our prints is called moire by the community, but I have never convinced myself that that is the correct term.
The direct drive stepper extruder on our machines pushes on a very short bit of filament above the extruder barrel. If you put your finger on the extruder you can feel it thump-thump as it extrudes. The motion of the stepper is not smooth (You get what you pay for - the stepper/driver/software only has so many discrete steps. It is not a servo.). This thumping causes pressure pulses in the extruder that cause a cyclic variation in the rate material is extruded which causes repeated slight bumps on our parts.
The reason there is pattern to the bumps on our print is that the length of the complete extruder path on a layer is not often an even multiple of the distance between bumps. So each time the extruder comes back around, the bumps are shifted a bit later (or earlier) in that place on the print. A wavy pattern emerges. It has been named a moire. Whatever.
Getting ride of it on our extruders requires smoothing out the extruder pulses. The easiest way to have the greatest effect is to get a 32 step extruder stepper driver (on older SDs they just popped off the motherboard - maybe not an option on newer machines?), and de-tune it so it was not putting out much torque, but was running much more smoothly - you just turn a tiny pot on the driver board.
Bowden extruders damp the pulses because the filament is a foot long running in the guide tube, not 1in. long directly coupled to the extruder.