I don't think he's conflating the ideas, so much as pointing out that Scala's ideas of "objects" can do what other module systems can do, but are "first class"

I don't think he's conflating the ideas, so much as pointing out that Scala's ideas of "objects" can do what other module systems can do, but are "first class" in the sense that the can be created on the fly and passed around as values. This has to do with things like path-dependent types and being able to import from arbitrary object instances instead of just from static namespaces.