Cross linking 1500 sites - Isn't that seriously insane

When I was reading through some of the posts in webmaster central official blog, I came across this particular post by Matt cutts,

https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html#c9006371411647145471



"Michael Clark, cross-linking between your own sites can be perfectly fine, especially if the links are relevant and you have a small number of sites. At a site review panel, an audience member once claimed that he had been deindexed by two major search engines for only cross-linking. Tim Mayer from Yahoo asked how many sites he had. The audience member sheepishly replied that he had 1500 (!) sites. I definitely wouldn't recommend heavy cross-linking if you've got that many sites. That's a lot of sites no matter how you slice it.
"



Isn't that insane crosslinking 1500 domains. We are afraid to cross link even 5 domains just to make sure google don't think that we are spamming the Search engines but this guy has cross linked 1500 domains and complains that his sites got booted. Mattcutts has confirmed in the same post that cross linking to a small limit is perfectly fine especially if the sites are on topic and they don't have duplicate contents.