Until a few hundred years ago, pink things were simple "light red" things in English (and many other languages) - we didn't have the word pink and so couldn't express the colour without using relative terms.
They don't. "Red" doesn't exist as a concept except abstractly. Words like "scarlet" and "teal" have been used since middle English to describe colors.
In other words: it's not that English works the way he described (it doesn't), but instead the inverse: Hungarian doesn't have an equivalent for "red".
In other languages, that grouping is done differently, and two colors that would both be appropriate to call "red" in English don't have a single common color term at all.
To get a feel of how this looks from the other side, consider various Asian languages that don't distinguish green and blue, and have a single word that has to be translated as "green or blue" to English.
Red isn't a color, it's a spectrum. It encompasses a whole range of colors. You use it to describe a similar set of colors when specificity isn't required ("What was that red thing?" vs "I think it would look good in crimson"), like most things in English.