Well, no. "Creative" in this context is jargon and means the part that people would generally just refer to as "an ad": art, design, text, sound, video -- the combination.

What he is saying is that nailing the actual ad trumps everything else (targeting, keywords, platform, etc) when it comes to being effective in advertisement.

Apologies for the trollishness. Still seems a little tautological (to be good be good). If the core of what you are doing doesn't work (Creative), what you are trying to do with your core (Advertise) won't work. Since nowhere in the post do I learn specifics of how to make "Creative" work, and "Creative" is the only thing that works, my lesson learned from was is "get good" at "Creative". Clearly it should have been "Creative is all that matters".

Well, he also said that the ad content also has to match the platform, and that can be very time dependant --- what didn't work 3 months ago might work now, and vice versa. So that argues for a huge number of iterative experiment, measurement, and adjust cycles, which is why the essay argues for a lot of automation since to be successful you need to do this a lot.