The other thing that bothered me was that he seemed to be endorsing
the idea that the bigger the pixel the better, with almost no
qualifications.

Back in my working days I used to work with single, large pixel
sensors.  'course, to get an image we had to scan the detector with
mirrors :-)  What contraptions those kluges were.  Of course, that was
in the thermal infrared region where silicon chips didn't work (except
for platinum silicide), so we couldn't use mosaics of detectors.  How
we longed for someone who could find a way to fabricate a monolithic
CCD in HgCdTe!