Was Craig mistaken? He said most apps can be updated in days, even if he is painting an overly rosy picture and it takes weeks or worse a month or two, we should have a native apple silicon version of Houdini a full year later.
Maybe Houdini is over complex, but Blender is beginning to do things that Houdini can do, it's free, and is already runs native.
I need to dedicate more time to Blender, it's crazy to me the things those guys can accomplish.
Blender isn't even following the VFX reference platform (https://code.blender.org/2022/02/vfx-reference-platform) so it doesn't really set a great example in terms of following good practices. So yes, it might be able to freely jump around and move faster but it does it at the price of not following any of the VFX standards for building software in a consistent environment (which helps studios deal with the related complexity of handling dependencies). It takes time to do things "the good way" and not "the quick way".
The complexity of any software product is always tied to at least 2 things, internal code base and external dependencies used. In the example video extract that you posted, it's clear that Craig is showing a fully native Swift app. Things get extremely more difficult and intertwined when writing anything that uses C/C++ libs