IIRC one example he once brought up was a text editor written with a small amount of code. Yea sure, I also had a word process that fit in 16k (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AtariWriter) but we're not on ASCII based computers with only text mode. Just a full unicode font takes 10s of megs of space. We're asking our software to draw fonts in any size, in several styles, in any language, and with emoji. That alone would break most of his assumptions because you can't just put them all in memory as pre-rendered glyphs, your user's don't have enough memory. Yet in games, most game devs would just basically say "F-that, you only get ASCII" or "F that, we're only supporting EFIGS + Katanana" and we only need 1 style.
Two good articles on the issues of text that games never deal with
https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/
https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/
The point being, it's the same all the way down in all areas. Game networking is not nearly as complicated as say the networking in a browser, that has to be able to run N video streams + M audio streams + X WebRTC video chats + Y Websockets, and video capture + audio capture and sending that data over the net, etc vs some game which if it ever plays video (many don't) only ever plays one video at a time, in known sizes and formats, and usually not streamed over the net but read directly from storage, etc...
Or take just displaying images. Most games know up front how many images will be displayed. You might even give your artists a budget, no area of the game can use more than XX megs of image data. A browser can't run with those limits. Go look at imgur.com or scrolldit.com or pinterest. Situations games never deal with.
And on top that there's just getting shit done. If I can write an app in a high-level system and ship on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, iPadOS, I'm going to. I don't care that it's more bloated than if I hand coded assembly language for each one and neither do my customers. Sure they care if my app is buggy or the UX sucks but that's got nothing to do with whether I squeezed out every last byte and cycle out out of it. HNers like to rant about apps that use some kind of less than native framework but nearly all them are using well made apps that use those frameworks, they're just not aware of it because the people making them did a good job.