No, it's a design choice, he favors ease of programming more than user experience. You might not agree with that choice, but it's not a flaw, he did it on purpose and knew the consequences.
A better name might be technical debt. It is a flaw from the perspective of someone seeing the error message. But for the developer it is a way of saving development time, which can be paid off later to fix it.
You're right that pg did it this way in the beginning to save time but years have gone by and the site is now more central to his business - especially as a tech demo. This back and forth argument presupposes that there isn't a better fix than the naive 'use old-style code' solution.
Anyways, the discussion is worth having. Only by pointing out problems do you fix them.