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No, it was "a failure to [immediately] recognize what counts as understanding and solving a [particular] problem", but that is a rationality skill, and is not entirely a function of a person's native general intelligence. Having a high g gives you an advantage in learning and/or independently inventing rationality skills, but not always enough of an advantage. History is littered with examples of very smart people committing rationality failures much larger than postulating "complexity" as a solution to a problem.
His mistake was entirely situational, given the fact that he understood a minute later what he had done incorrectly and probably rarely or never made that mistake again.
I don't want to drag this out, but I think you're going too far in your defense of the reasonableness of this error:
Read the exchange: He understood the error because someone else had to explain it to him over a wide inferential gap. If it were just, "Hey, complexity isn't a method" "Oh, right -- scratch that", then you would be correct, but that's not what happened. EY had to trace the explanation back to an earlier essay and elaborate on the relationship between those concepts and what Marcello just tried to do.
Also, I don't see the point in distinguishing g and rationality here -- somehow, Marcello got to that point without recognizing the means/ends distinction EY talks about on his own. Yes, it's a rationality skill that can be taught, but failing to recognize it in the first place does say something about how fast you would pick up rationalist concepts in general.
Third, I never criticized his failure to immediately solve the problem, just his automatic, casual classification of "complexity" as being responsive.
Yes, Marcello may be very bright, very well-versed in rationality, have many other accomplishments -- but that doesn't mean that there's some reasonable situational defense of what he did there.