That's the gist of his whole talk – that doing things "the UNIX way" (which can be defined to various degrees of specificity) has been cargo culted, and that we should reexamine whether solutions that were pragmatic 50+ years ago is still the best we can do.

The specific reason I mentioned it was because his initial example was about how much more ceremony and boilerplate is needed when you need to pretend that USB interfaces are actually magic files and directories.