Having spent the past 15 years in the region I think he hit the nail on the head. I believe the biggest message Atlanta is sending out is one of music - musical arts are alive and kicking in Atlanta in ways that are very different to the other big music cities. I'm really hopeful that the general creative vibes continue to flourish there.
My friends and I regularly make similar comments about Dallas. I very rarely meet someone new without finding out that they are somehow connected to somebody I know.
Sayings like "Dallas is the world's biggest small town" and "I know I shouldn't be surprised, but how do the hell do those two know each other?" are common utterances among people I know. Also, for people I have a ton of oddball connections with, "Dallas is the world's biggest small town, and it's all [name]'s fault".
(I'm joking, but I feel like this might be the kernel of something - most notably Atlanta's long-standing problems with segregation and resistance to public transit.)
I've observed similar things about Dallas.
Property values are going up here a little, but Dallas is still a really cheap place to live compared to any major coastal city or even hilly places like Austin, and the recent growth in property values is largely because a surprisingly large number of companies have all decided to relocate here in a very short span of time, and the housing industry hasn't caught up yet. I expect this trend won't last: eventually there will be enough new housing built in exurbs like Frisco and Prosper (and small towns like Celina being turned into exurbs) that it'll counterbalance the influx of new residents.
Traffic is starting to be a problem...if we could get rail out 20,85,75, and further north on 400 it would bring a huge geography into play and really take off. So far it hasn't.
Atlanta seems to still be finding its identity. All the industries are nascent, it always seems just on the cusp of a big transformation. I have a theory about cities, that property values are largely constrained by geography as the first and practically only factor, and Atlanta has no geographical limitations that jack up prices. As a result, property has always been comparatively cheap.
Atlanta seems to be a big sponge, not even close to hitting scaling limits. I feel like you could almost pour the same amount of wealth that NYC has into the area and it still won't look like even Chicago. It'll just sprawl outwards into adjacent metro areas like Alpharetta or Decatur. Even the city centers here, Downtown, Midtown, and increasingly Buckhead, feel like three distinct cities rather than part of a whole.
As a result it simply won't ever come to have a more coherent identity and message than it did in the nineties with rap and the music industry.