Addition,
today I accidentally bumped into a redo of the eevblog routing of a bunch of nixie tubes, but now done in several smaller steps, and this gives a good impression of the advantage of routing tracks in smaller groups compared to try to do everything at once.
Autorouting this whole layout at once just makes a mess of things (as Dave showed) KiCad’s own “fake router” is very simple and just attempts to route tracks one by one. I guess that freerouting has enough smarts to make something decent of a local group of 10 or so tracks, but would also make a big mess of routing everything at once.
I guess the end conclusion in the video is a bit misleading. Sure, the quality of the router is very comparable to what dave himself did, but the time for setting up this thing is not mentioned in the end result. For example, it probably takes quite some time to figure out that placing the via’s for the serial data and clock lines first was needed. In KiCad, this might just as well have been done later, cause KiCad’s interactive router can easily shove some tracks aside to make room for these via’s later. I guess altium can do this too, so I wonder how much planning was done ahead of time to make this look like a “streamlined video”.