I know the name. I am not impressed by his reasoning. I mean, HTML and CSS being the result of the rule of least power? CSS is a mess, and there is nothing least about it.
I have no idea what CSS 1.0 looked like, but I suspect it was an entirely different world when he made that statement. At that time, the web was really just blobs of text with the most minimal formatting. Not the basis for trillion dollar companies that want pixel perfect alignment.
If you're unfamiliar with the name you might be well served to look up his contributions to the web first.