Press fire button to fire.
Nah, he does have a point. The old games were more unforgiving, but they also expected you to be able to breath without someone showing you first how to do it in a tutorial. Then again, some of them were just plain dumb in their expectations like the author of that video points out too.
Personally I'd say the direction is towards the better. Yes, we all know the horror stories of scripts ruining the games, the features being "dumbed down" and the games being made for simpletons these days, but you know what? I like that. I get to be intellectual enough every single day at the uni and at the work. I don't need to feel superior over other people
for playing a freaking video game on my spare time for crying out loud!! And that's exactly what I see people doing on regular basis on various forums: "our game is so deep and it requires so much intelligence and it doesn't hold your hand and it's just not for everyone and yada yada yada." It's all just ego boosting.
That being said, I prefer sims and the supposedly more "intelligent" games like ArmA or the Paradox titles, but even in these I take convenience over ego boost any day. "Artificially difficult and poorly designed" doesn't equate to "more intelligent and challenging" game.
(Which, for the record, the Megaman games were not. I bloody loved those as much as the author of the video does.)