I think the strategy of "monolith first" isn't a poor one, but it is a little humorous to see someone who makes part of their living helping companies break apart their monoliths advocate it.
Makes perfect sense to me.
A lot of what he's arguing against is cargo cult programming, and I think it's fair for anyone to argue against that. If your only explanation for why you chose one architecture or design pattern over the others (especially if that option introduces a lot of additional drawbacks) is "because that's just what you do", you need to stop and objectively evaluate what you're doing.