The whole thing seemed to be engineered for drama, and the "results" that most people got out of it are an exceptionally clickbaity oversimplification of what's going on. It's like that numberphile thing with 1 + 2 + 3 + ...

It's more complicated than the lightbulb just "turning on faster than the electric field could travel through the wire", in fact (depending on the exact circumstances) the initial current would be tiny, probably not enough to meaningfully "light" the lightbulb, and only after the light-speed delay would it ramp up to full-brightness.

Electric field obviously travels in all directions, but the electrons which produce fluctuations in the electric field, and propagate those fluctuations through mutual interactions, are constrained to the wire. Hence unless your wires are so close together as to basically be connected to each other, air significantly attenuates the electric field wave propagation. This is a reproduction of the experiment and an in-depth explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vrhk5OjBP8 .

I still watch his videos sometimes because it can be quite entertaining/thought-provoking, but for the past 5-7 years a lot of them are clickbaity sponsored stuff, and you really need to mentally skip a lot of bullshit to get to the nugget of value.