How is a movie award objectively always on point? 

Does he really though? I mean for starters how many Japanese gaming publications that give out a GOTY award can you name? Personally I only know of 1 (Famitsu). So it doesn't really matter who is funding the website, there's not much chance of the average English speaking gamer (and most likely journalist for that matter) even knowing many Japanese GOTY awards to list on such a site.

Is it really though? Maybe if you include mobile gaming, but limited to just console/PC the major European countries (UK, Germany & France) would be very close indeed to Japan on that metric, maybe even surpassing Japan depending on just how much PC gaming contributes to it. That would be at true for at least the current gen, probably the last gen, and maybe even before that too.

Besides, how important a country is to the gaming industry and the quality of the games it produces aren't necessarily linked. Germany is a country that absolutely can compete with Japan based on per capita console/PC software/hardware sales, yet how many good German made games can you name?

Plus, even the console maker angle is kind of weakened when 1 of them makes all of their best 1st party games outside Japan.

VGC. For console software sales only:

2018 Japan = 4.45 games per capita. Germany = 4.07 games per capita.
2017 Japan = 3.74 games per capita. Germany = 4.04 games per capita.

I know VGC isn't the most accurate source, and I used current population figures rather than the ones for the relevant years (although the difference from that would be negligible anyway), but still if that isn't competing then I don't know what is! Plus, while I don't have any figures I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that Germany has a much larger PC market than Japan so if you were to add that in then Germany would likely win 2017 by a larger margin and may even win 2018.

Besides, I'd say "Per capita, Japan has always been the most influential country in gaming, by far" is the bolder claim. I was only using Germany as an example due to how few critically acclaimed games have been produced despite the popularity of gaming there. Compare the UK to Japan instead and with it being a larger gaming market than Germany while also having a smaller population it would fare even better against Japan on a per capita basis.

And if you'd rather go on how big the game making industry is, rather than how many people buy/play games in a specfic country then Canada would surely compete with Japan on that front. It has one of largest contingents of game devs in the world yet less than a third of the population of Japan, so on a per capita basis Japan surely isn't going to win "by far".