It looks like a perfectly reasonable response to me. What face is there to save? The fact that this was brought up "within the first five minutes" is far better than "after a plethora of interviews".

I had an interview with Parsely a few years back. Took over 3 weeks of back & forth before they rejected me with a reason that should have been squashed the first hour of the interview.

Agreed, the underlying process is still there.