Yep, that's fair. I wouldn't call it "false claim", because I don't it's actually incorrect, you can be perfectly effective and go quite far with just a small selective subset of the language ("A tour of C++, 2nd edition" gives a good overview of this subset IMHO[0]), but the claim is ignoring the mental overhead and decision paralysis induced by C++ complexity.

[0]: https://www.stroustrup.com/tour2.html