I don't think he was being serious about it.
With colony sizes it sort-of makes sense. You don't have to check them often and there's a tooltip. It also makes sense because the exponential is tied to production / consumption values.
Even though I mentioned mods earlier, a dedicated enough vanilla player will run into all kinds of interesting stuff if he only plays for long enough. Ridiculous amounts of money being one of them. Money sinks are ok. But money becoming a commodity is not that terrible. It feels good to have some of the game's restrictions ease after a while. There's so many things you can't fix by throwing money at them. Adding some of those things sounds to me more worthwhile than imagining ways to spend that crazy money.
You can't buy real friends, for example. It's a cold, cold galaxy out there...