TBF a lot of what he did sounds like work that would be done by the autorouter on most electronics CAD today.

Autorouting is still not generally used very much in PCB design. I suspect it could be used more than it currently is, but generally you spend a lot more time specifying design rules and the results are often quite poor.

s/siloed/high speed

At today's circuits number of layers, speeds and frequencies it's impossible to do it by hand.

Sure, you could train your average engineer to use Cadence/Mentor, etc but it's usually the design engineer that does capture and PCB routing.

Slow != impossible.

Draftsman was always a skilled job, it was never about merely producing neat version of an engineers notes, such as a typist.