I don’t think Levin is a crank. He went on Lex Fridman’s podcast and talked about his bioelectricity work and morphogenesis. Like you said, I think people who don’t know much about development took that to be the whole story, when in reality it’s just one academic doing what academics do best: talk about their own work.

Edit: one small quibble with your comment is that it’s too reductive to say that morphogenesis is all encoded in the DNA. It’s really an emergent property of the whole system. Like DNA is only a few billion base pairs, which is not nearly enough to store the precise positions of every cell, much less every protein.