The choron belongs to Ysyakh, the Sakha summer festival held around the solstice, and its use there is a sequence of offering before it is a sequence of drinking. Kumys is scattered toward the fire and toward the sky first. Only then does the vessel pass among the people present, and at a large gathering it moves through many hands.
That order matters for how the object should be understood. A choron is not a drinking cup that acquired a ceremonial version. The libation is the point, and the shared drinking follows from it, which is why the largest examples are made to be handled by several people in turn rather than by one.
Ysyakh itself was discouraged and at points prohibited under Soviet rule, and was revived on a substantial scale in the later twentieth century. It is now the principal public festival of the Sakha Republic and draws very large crowds. The choron came back with it and has since become one of the most reproduced Sakha objects, made as a souvenir, cast as a monument, printed on official material and used as a general emblem of the republic. A visitor is far more likely to meet the form as a symbol than as a vessel in use, and it is worth knowing which one is in front of you.