At least they are not saying Sonic is going back to his roots.
FFFFFFFFFFFUZKZK that was such an overused statement and never made any damn sense anyways. They used it for Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes, Sonic Pocket Adventure (which it was actually correct with!), all of the Advance games, Sonic 06, all rereleases of games, and even in Unleashed.
But for the speed as a reward comment, it is mostly correct. For something like Sonic 1, it is actually fairly hard to just blindly dash through the level because it is was designed as a normal platformer. When you memorize the level you can speed through it and pull off your own kind of tricks if you can plan the layout good enough, such as bouncing higher and higher off of enemies and monitors or by jumping off a ramp at JUST the right moment, you can launch off into a direction rapidly and smash through walls or whatever.
In the newer games, they mostly skip the basic platforming sections or force dull flat ones too much to make it seem like it is JUST LIKE THE CLASSIKZ. Even if I like how Generations is turning out I already see this design mentality being used just like all of the others and it can get frustrating because it is obviously meant for speedrunning, which goes against the "Speed as a reward" comment.
