I think he's being fair. The real difficulty in making an ASIC is justifying the huge price to start production. The good old "the first chip is worth $10 millions, the second is worth $5" or something like that.
Designing a bitcoin mining IP is not exactly difficult, it's basically two rounds of SHA-256. It's still some work of course, but as far as ASICs are concerned it's very low on the difficulty scale.
The "innovation" here obviously isn't in the "cutting edge technology that moves the state of the art forward" at all.
The innovation at the time was that the conventional wisdom that it's "effectively impossible" to do small custom ASIC runs for relatively cheap. Most were laughed at back then when this topic was brought up for other use cases.
While I'm sure none of that was super exciting to someone who works on custom ASIC design for some enterprise, it was pretty neat watching effectively a bunch of hackers figure the process out and do it for a tenth of the predicted "first chip" costs. This has a lot of value in of itself, simply proving something is possible for $a_lot_of_money+skill vs. $epic_truckloads_of_money.
Nowadays it's not super interesting since you're back to needing to be a "big player" to get into the game - but for a year or so it was a real fun time to be a bystander and watch the rapid pace of development.
I doubt that 65nm would be able to beat a GPU (which are all 16nm class or better) at the task however. If you make an ASIC but if the $3000 Titan V is more power efficient anyway, then you've wasted your time and money.
65nm and other "old node" designs primarily are about mass-manufacturing a design. They probably can beat an FPGA in cost and margins once mass produced. But for performance and power-efficiency, you gotta be way better. Maybe 28nm or 22nm class or better to beat the GPUs (or even standard CPUs like EPYC and the SHA256 accelerators built into it)
A 65nm or even 130nm Bitcoin ASIC handily beats a 16nm GPU at mining, in terms of perf per watt and perf per dollars. And by handily I mean 1 or 2 orders of magnitude.
There's a bit more to this; there's clever optimisations you can do (based on the Merkle–Damgård structure of SHA256 and the format/semantics of the data being hashed): http://www.mit.edu/~jlrubin/public/pdfs/Asicboost.pdf
Yeah I conveniently avoided to talk about that, but this is more like exploiting a weakness in the bitcoin protocol, it wasn't really meant to be feasible (and made many people angry when it was patented). That is innovation however, I grant you that.
Designing a bitcoin mining IP is not exactly difficult, it's basically two rounds of SHA-256. It's still some work of course, but as far as ASICs are concerned it's very low on the difficulty scale.