Terrible commentary. Relies on low-hanging fruit and a ignorance of styles and movements.
Yes some buildings are ugly, and some architects were not that good, but it isn’t a subject that you can just saw everything made from X to Y point is terrible, while (insert olden time here) was when it was all good.
Let’s see what the critics thought of the Eiffel Tower when it was built, shall we?
“A half-built factory pipe, a carcass waiting to be fleshed out with freestone or brick, a funnel-shaped grill, a hole-riddled suppository”
—Joris-Karl Huysmans
“This high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of Cyclops, but which just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney”
—Guy de Maupassant
“This mast of iron gymnasium apparatus, incomplete, confused and deformed”
—François Coppée
Watson wasn't pretending to teach a survey course of styles and movements.
He was explicating the totalitarian intent of the "brutalists." And as I'm sure you know, that term, "brutalism," is one that is proudly used by advocates of modernist architecture.
If you want a little more scholarly overview of the same topic, there is Tom Wolfe's "From Our House to Bauhaus."
I prefer house from the Streamliner Era.