I completely agree with his take. What I always found interesting with greener BFT consensus protocols that a lot of modern cryptocurrencies implement is that you can actually fix the problem of untrusted services: you can provide a cryptographic proof to the light clients (the real clients) when they query the blockchain, which allows them to verify the response without synchronizing to the blockchain. This is what Celo is doing, I think Zcash had a proposal to do the same? But essentially any BFT consensus protocol should be able to do this.

You don't get the same insurance that you get by verifying all of the blockchain of course, but recursive zero-knowledge proofs that attest to the state transitions might solve this (cf Mina).

Another issue is key rotations, which increase the size of the proof (as you need to give proofs to all the key rotations before you can give a proof to the latest state of the chain), but I believe that zero-knowledge proofs can fix that as well.

Bottom line: it's actually not that grim, solutions are there, but users have to care for people to implement them, apply them, and for the solutions to receive adoption.