He mentions shoving and throwing specifically and only IN THE CONTEXT OF melee fighters having not that many options in the first few levels compared to other classes, which is a fact of DnD 5e... this is NOT Larian homebrew, and swen did not say in any way that 5e doesn't work in a video game here... he did NOT say 'throwing and shoving is what feedback tells us players want'.
It's literally just that it helps make classes like the fighter more interesting in the beginning, and I would argue that thats very much the case.