> He claims that the way EE is taught is a "lie"

The thing is: this is sort of true. Now, all electrical engineers are very familiar with transmission line theory, that's pretty much their bread and butter. And all EEs know that if you're not working with well-defined transmission lines (like coaxial cables), you need to use a field solver. 2D field solvers are often sufficient, but if not 3D field solvers can and will be used.

And then most of those same EEs, despite having just used a field solver which clearly shows that all the power is in the fields, which are in the dielectric space between the conductors, persist in using the mental model that electrical power moves in wires.

This isn't just a pedantic quibble. There are real, practical effects. If you're designing a PCB and you have two signal lines with overlapping fields, those signals are going to couple, which will create common mode current, which will cause an EMI problem. You can stop those signals coupling by making them reference different ground planes, which makes the fields no longer overlap. If you route a signal line from one side of a ground plane to the other, you have to provide a path for the fields to get to the other side of the ground plane (i.e. "route" the dielectric, generally with a ground via), because if you don't, they will find their own path anyway and you won't like the results.

If you persist in thinking that electrical power flows through wires, these sorts of effects are mysterious and only explicable through the magical black box that is a field solver. If, on the other hand, your mental model is that electrical power is in the fields, then -- surprise! -- the results of a field solver won't be so mysterious any more.

And if you have a more accurate mental model, if you can predict more or less how the fields will behave before looking at the results of the field solver, then that means you can design with the fields in mind, rather than just tweaking things until the field solver stops being angry at you, but not actually understanding why the design works in the end.

Don't believe me? Here's Rick Hartley, an extraordinarily experienced PCB designer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG0Apol-oj0&t=1102s

I found the responses from other EEs on youtube like Electroboom and EEVBlog disappointing. You can quibble about details of how he presented it (like, saying 1/c rather than 1m/c), but Maxwell's equations are the correct description of how electricity works, and Veritasium is absolutely correct in his core point which is that power flows outside the wires. Other models, such as lumped-element and transmission lines can suffice for many purposes but are ultimately wrong. Rather than responding towards him with hostility, perhaps they should have considered if their own mental models weren't quite as accurate as they had thought.

As a final note, the problem as presented by Veritasium can't be accurately modeled by anything less than Maxwell's equations (i.e. a field solver), but you can get most of the way with transmission line theory and tweaking it with some physical common sense. Closing the switch causes electric and magnetic fields to propagate across the gap between the switch and the light bulb, and down the two transmission lines, at the speed of light (modified by the relative permittivity). The current that will initially flow across the light bulb, once the fields reach it, can be calculated from the characteristic impedance of two parallel wires acting as a transmission line. When the signals reach the end of the transmission lines, they will "see" a short and reflect with opposite voltage; when that opposite-voltage signal reaches the switch and light bulb the transmission lines act like a short and from that point on the light-bulb receives the full current. That 1m/c delay, in particular, isn't accounted for by transmission line theory at all. The way you get that (without a field solver) is by knowing that electrical power is in the fields, which propagate at the speed of light. Since transmission line theory can't accurately model the problem in full, I think Veritasium can be forgiven for not mentioning it (especially since he was targeting a general audience).