Sounds like observability, proper load testing, etc. beat a system without that. Saying that spaghetti code beat clean code makes it sound like it won because it was spaghetti code.
I haven't watched the video, nor am I going to with a clickbaity and apparently misleading title like that.
Using a function is strictly worse than figuring out the formatting at compile time (something Zig also does).
The derives are just shortcuts. You can write everything out long-hand like you would in C++ or Python too if you really want.
Honestly both of these complaints are essentially "why does Rust use macros to make writing code better/easier?".