He does, he just thinks once a developer of a nostr client is threatened by a government or otherwise compromised, the rest will be intimidated and pull out of app stores like Phoenix did. Not exactly a NOSTR killer attack, but he kinda has a point

He has a point but only in a vacuum. That scenario is plausible but is not anywhere near the whole picture. He is not considering the fact that we can simply turn to any of the other nostr clients. Oh, they're all "banned"? We we can easily sideload the apps. And if that doesn't work we can spin up private clients with open source code. All the while your identity persists like nothing happened. A protocol is PRECISELY what we need. Saying we need unfaliable devs is like saying the solution to corruption is a perfectly virtuous government. All humans have a weak spot. Nostr provides trustless identity and the foundation for it.

There is something to it - fear will dampen development, but probably not for long

He must think that each "app" has its own backend with all the Nostr notes stored there, so that apps specifically can be pressured to censor some people and then all users of that app will not see that content. If that is how he thinks it works then his criticism is very reasonable.

I thought he was smarter than that

…or is being dishonest / deceptive. He’s not an idiot, so what game is he playing? I think we all know.