I think what he's trying to say, is that's a lot easier to convince someone that one thing is a good idea, rather than about 7 untested, unknown things all at the same time. Conventions are, well, conventional for a reason.
Absolutely true! And that's one of the 1,000 reasons why GridWhale might fail.
There are already lots of people working to simplify web development by fixing one thing at a time. But what if we could start from scratch and build an integrated platform in which all the pieces work together? Would that be better than piecemeal evolution?
Take something like https://Bubble.io. That's an integrated system which has its own custom semantics for UI, storage, etc. But people build apps on it because it's really easy to build apps.
My premise is that there are some people who are looking for an integrated development experience (like Delphi or like Visual Basic) who are not satisfied with either current complex tools or the more limited nocode systems like Bubble.io.
Will there be enough of them to build a business? We'll see.
Hm. Custom SemVer, custom language, custom GUI framework? It's a lot.