Okay, so let me get this straight. You ask a question about what "back to basics" means, but instead of finding out the answer, you...invent your own! That's right, you literally just imagine what the answer is (at least you're honest enough to say so): "So, I am guessing Mr. Lecce you want students to use..."

Let's get back to basics, except philosophy. This is called a straw man argument. You aren't arguing against the actual position of Mr. Lecce. You're arguing against something you imagined: a straw man. And you're not shy about imagining it, either: you go all the way down to declaring what the quality of the pedagogy will be.

(You then follow on by using two specific methods suited for the example you gave but which result in half-speed calculations if done in your head on a more difficult example--which exemplifies why you want to spend plenty of time on the basics, like mathematics, so that you can teach both shortcuts and the best general algorithms.)

Let's get back to basics again, but terminology rather than mathematics. "Back to basics" overwhelmingly has been used to mean not back to the original pedagogy but rather core mathematics and language skills as opposed to history, institutions, physical education, art, whatever. Even when it's used for pedagogy (which is not at all clear from what Lecce said), it tends to mean that teachers teach the material and students follow and do homework, rather than having student-led or curiosity-driven or some other mode of learning. Don't believe me? Ask a large language model what "back to basics" means in an educational context. They have this stuff down.

I think it's great to teach students a variety of ways to be facile with manipulating numbers so the answers (exact and approximate) are essentially instinctive; this provides a powerful boost to thinking that you cannot get if you defer to an external agent to do that thinking for you. So, sure, think about fences, or the equivalent. "Kinda like 1000 - 800 so 200 but a bit more cause 7whatever's a bit less" is a great thing to have zap through the kid's head with no effort required.

But as criticism of Mr. Lecce's announcement, this is really poor quality.