Is it a poor take against object oriented, or some half-hidden criticism of the use of masks during the Covid-19 pandemic?

For the former, then I would expect a computer science professor to do better than just bashing the concept. When is it good, and when is it bad? What did it bring to programming languages?

For the latter, I would expect a computer science professor to know that epidemiology is not their thing and they should refrain from concluding "stuff" from a scientific paper they found.

Aeson parsing seems straightforward to me, not sure it could be easier in any language. Serialization from your endpoint is automatic, based on your data types.

The real benefit of using a well typed language here is that you only need to parse the data once at this point, after that the type system makes sure the data is of correct format everywhere else in your codebase.

I think he used that quote with the year timestamp to show how silly that quote is.