Considering Microsoft forcing a year QA on them with the full MS QA team... yea I imagine the partnership and exclusivity did indeed yield a much less buggy and thus better product.
Does he? By now his brain may be addled enough for him to believe that. The guy's been Todd Howard for decades now and that's really got to wear on a person's mind.
I really love the game but optimisation and performance are a joke. I played it with 30fps on console and PC and it needs absurd amounts of power. Would it be even more worse with a multi release on PS5?
I absolutely believe that exclusivity can create a better product. A company can put more resources into a game if they're more worried about making a system seller than a profit driver.
But I don't think for a moment that it benefited the game by creating a focus for the developers by limiting the consoles.
Back in the day, console exclusivity meant you could take advantage of system-specific features such as the ridiculously powerful SIMD core in the PS3. Now, 2/3 major consoles have nearly identical hardware, and the third is an overclocked smartphone, so there's no real benefit to system lock-in.
Seriously, if they said this about the Switch, nobody would bat an eye. But it seems to be easier to simultaneously develop for PS5 and XBox Series than to develop for both consoles and PC, given how terrible a lot of PC ports are.
It worked for The last of Us and Spiderman. Optimization through exclusivity allows the publishers to spend less time chasing down random bugs and rendering issues.