What he said is right though. Let me put it this way, politics has a system it's relied on. Ancient Greece has its own style of democracy. Current US has its own style of democracy. The EU has its own kind of system. Here's the thing to consider, the content and state of the system can change over time, but the low level of it - the rule to how the changes can happens or how things operate - rarely changes. Politics can change the rules within the system, but it doesn't typically change or revise the foundation of the system. When revision of the system foundation is so rarely done, the things taking advantage of this foundation obviously don't get solved.
When you say someone who wants to break a system will, it's actually because the base of the system doesn't change so the abuse can keep happening. Let's use US politic as an example. Gerrymandering is a problem. There's no sign of it getting fixed and continue to be a problem even now. The reason is because the current system had made it so that the decision to do so could never come to past, at least not easily. It's a deadlock. If instead the system is revised from the ground up this would be as simple as reasoning during the redesign process that the current method is broken and it isn't good at representing the people so it should not be used. Currently that's not how it's being solved, and it's like trying to fix a problem on your computer without the option to shut down or reset the device.
What he's saying is the system is broken like that and we're not solving it by the most efficient method (mainly due to it being so costly). Even so, sometimes it's just better to scrap and start anew.
That said, I don't think it applies to Fediverse at the moment. It's so new that there are so many ways it could develop and if it fails that doesn't imply the concept of Fediverse is never supposed to succeed. It may just be because the best steps to manage it wasn't taken. Going back to the political analogy, it's like having just the concept of democracy as a framework. But it hasn't been decided yet whether this democracy is going to be dominated by just two parties (like the US), or has many different parties with ranked voting (like the UK). Both are democracies but the foundations and implementations are different. And well, one works better than the other.