> Basically that it would be counterproductive to hire a top tier engineer and restrict his token usage to let's say $200 or $500 a month.

That's not what he said, though. He gave a number, and that number happens to correspond to something on the order of 25 billion Opus 4.6 tokens (hard to say what input vs. output ratio is like). He also said he is currently "deeply alarmed" if his engineers don't spend that much.