Six years isn't that long at all, and if it's six year spent exclusively designing within a very narrow space, I wouldn't really rate his opinion particularly high as far as being reflective of the rest of the industry.

...the fact that he says that you barely won't have time to even communicate your concept to the programmers makes me wonder whether big companies like EA, SEGA and Nintendo follow this procedure.

No, the process described is not one you should consider normal for most developers.

Endless runners may be simple enough that their GDD is only 2 pages long :) At that point you dont even need a designer other than for a couple hours of "crazy checking" - the rest is damn common sense :D