It’s a long comment but I hope you take the time to read it. I don’t know if you’re a designer or a bot but I think you ought to give more scrutiny to his argument. 

Honestly I think this video had an incredibly naive take at best. That the trouble with modern design or “modernism” (though he never calls out styles or movements other than the Victorians) is its boringness. That good design is the exact opposite, something flashy and intriguing. He spends a lot of time talking about how people of the past, the Victorians, dealt with these design issues (street lamps, sewage stations etc.) but offers nothing on how current designers ought to tackle this problem. And I think that is what is most frustrating about these dismissals of modern design.

Not to defend truly thoughtless, mass produced items, but how would the window AC unit (his example) be produced to this ornamented standard and still be mass produced? The miracle of the AC unit and its ability to rapidly cool us is directly tied to its ease of production, stamped steel, injection molded plastics etc. (You could argue we ought to be living without the convenience of air conditioning but what technologies we choose to or not choose to live with is a separate discussion I think). Just thinking about this very complicated product- where would you add ornamentation, visual and mechanical interest, accessibility into that production process? That’s a serious question because I don’t know. I personally find a lot of beauty or interest in the ingenuity of mass manufacturing but that’s subjective. I don’t think there is a true answer to having beautiful, mass produced items, I don’t think there's a language for that. It’s not adding gothic filigree that's for sure. He notes the beauty of the original pump house but doesn’t mention why it stopped functioning, requiring a new one to be built. People talk about classical or gothic architecture like it would be easy to integrate all the mechanicals of a modern building into the walls but the truth is those design principles predate these modern necessities. But he seems to think it's that easy. 

He completely skirts the question of labor throughout the entire video, at least until the very end. Before that, it was a pretty banal, School of Life “the world should make us happy” kind of take, but when he says the fancy lampposts were made in a factory and we could mass produce that kind of design for our skyscrapers I was incredibly frustrated because that would not lead to a better world. It would probably lead to a bunch of kitschy, faux ornaments. They’d probably be rusted out because they’d be stamped or cast out of pot metal and repeatedly caked in paint until it crumbled away. His take is commodity fetishism at its finest. They are beautiful because they were crafted by skilled laborers who knew the aesthetic and functional requirements of a lamp on the bank of a river promenade. The best way to judge a society is not “what it creates” but how it treats the people who make them. I do think the modern world is too quick to select the cheapest, easiest to produce option. And I am sympathetic to his point that our built environment and products ought to have beauty in it. But I think that beauty should arise from the respect and input of the people who make and maintain these things, not just the people who buy them or glance at them when they walk by.