To be clear, you will not find that Veritasium is wrong here (whether hilariously or otherwise); it supports the essential features of the original claims.
Even the part where he explains the problem with the chain metaphor is wrong. If you actually had a mechanical chain and an engine moving it back and forth, you could extract energy from the movement of the chain either by exploiting friction (to heat up something, just like a resistor does) or by using gears that resist movement in the opposite direction (e.g. slipping the chain) to achieve movement in a single direction. There's nothing all that mysterious about how we extract energy from electricity, at least in practice.
In fact, you could even get an equivalent of the small induced curent: if you recreate his extremely long circuit with a motor instead of the battery and an extremely sensitive motion detector instead of the light bulb 1m away, you would detect some motion [1m/speed of sound in material connecting them] seconds after the motor is started, assuming you are not floating in a perfect vacuum; and then vastly higher motion after 300,000km/speed of sound in chain seconds later.
Nothing more mysterious going on with the EM field.
> Nothing more mysterious going on with the EM field.
That's precisely the point here - it all works out exactly in accordance with Maxwell's laws, via transmission line theory - see also my other reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29934233)
This is to be expected, since the Poynting vector is ultimately a consequence of two very basic physical laws: conservation of energy, and special relativity. Any system which obeys these two laws will have some equivalent of Poynting's vector, though of course the exact formula will be different.
Veritasium's video is deliberately constructed to obscure these facts, and to make it seem like electricity is in fact more mysterious/counter-intuitive than it actually is.