It's not clear to me how badly EY erred. It seems that he was comparing the size of code designed by humans to the size of code "designed" by evolution, which would seem to be his primary mistake. I also concur that he shouldn't get from complexity of the evolved brain to "number of insights needed to create AI" (charitably: he doesn't claim to know the exact conversion ratio, but in principle there should be one).

I agree with your "information in genes+environment" although the example of needing light (and other inputs) for the brain to develop normally isn't the best. I consider the womb-environment to be more impressive - how easy is it to reverse engineer the appropriate womb+mitochondria+??? (sorry, I'm no expert) given the genome?

This was nicely presented. Nitpick: I would not say "make it highly compressible"; I would say "make it smaller". You can make something compressible by adding redundancy, which is not what you intended.