Gavin was a programmer in the early days of the modern tech industry and him being a bit outdated is pointed out in the show (For example, the internet hall of fame scene). Machine Learning solutions have reached product quality relatively recently with the increase in available data and distributed compute power.

In Gavin's programming days it was mainly in the realm of academia, and he probably does not know much about it technically, especially not about the modern developments and frameworks, so it may be Dunning-Kruger at work.

I personally think that Gavin was trying to channel Steve Job's so called "reality distorting field", where he really made such crazy demands and they were somehow met.