The point he is making is that a lot of stuff that you are told you need. You actually don't. Especially if you are working by yourself or in a very small team.
Getting stuff working is much more important. I'd rather people concentrate on stuff like CI, Unit Tests and Deployments.
I like unit tests, and I would happily adopt a CI system if my project included non-Python code and had to build multiple wheels. But formatting code properly in my editor is second nature by now; the functions I write are typically so short that it'd be hard to do anything a linter would object to; and type-checking doesn't just introduce busy-work, it works against part of the reason I'm using Python in the first place. I actively don't want to tell people not to call my code with a perfectly compatible type just because I hadn't considered it as within the range of possible compatible types.
Never said it was a silver bullet. I said I would rather people concentrate on more important things than configuring a linter. Half the time this stuff gives you weird errors that don't make a lot of sense (especially with JavaScript/TypeScript), sometimes you are literally making the compiler warning go away because there is literally nothing wrong with the code.
I do use eslint/prettier btw, but other collegues can never seem to get this working so I've just given up on it and then fix the linter issues whenever I come across them.
You've never met people who take what you now call obvious hyperbole absolutely seriously and literally?
I guess you're going to continue to get surprised by how often you get criticised in this specific way, by many, many other people.
Hint: when someone doesn't understand you, you were in fact not obvious, no matter what you think — communication is a multiplayer game, not a single-player endeavour.
Getting stuff working is much more important. I'd rather people concentrate on stuff like CI, Unit Tests and Deployments.