Are you suggesting that Bitcoin's security hinges on people's good faith (to not deploy "hundreds of nodes with multiple amazon Ec2 instances without users actively securing them and using them"?!
No. He suggests that a naive attack that succeeds to only create a majority in the least capital intensive of the three areas (nodes, mining, capital/economic majority) in isolation is doomed to fail -- due to a reaction of the rest of the network out of pure self-interest.
So how should have the network reacted to the boldface above, in its self-interest? Did it do so?
If yes, why was boldface dangerous?
If not, why not?
Yes, devs and people who actually understand bitcoin corrected the company and educated the errors in their ways. Simply deploying hundreds of nodes without active users securing them with economic interests isn't extremely dangerous in itself because wallets still check for the longest PoW chain and not just the rules from the corresponding nodes. It is dangerous in a sense that those nodes could falsely give the impression that our ecosystem was more decentralized and it could introduce some potential non-consensus bugs but any nodes that were compromised and didn't follow the consensus rules would simply be an ignored alt.
You keep implying a link between "economic majority" and "nodes." Not obvious to me.
Nodes could be created & run (at minimal expense) by actors hodling no bitcoin; many (most) hodlers don't run nodes, so?
You aren't realizing that full nodes validate both the longest PoW chain and if the valid rules are being followed. What you are describing is the creation of an alt , which is fine and has no direct impact on bitcoin. Nodes that don't have economic interests behind them are of little value. Not all nodes are equal!
Here is an analogy to consider:
What is worth more: 5 large fortune 500 companies and their userbase that enjoys their products and services or 100 shell companies with no capital, no products, and no users? What happens in an ecosystem when these 100 shell companies are introduced to a location and the general public chooses to ignore them because they don't like their product?