I think there's a decent amount of hyperbole, but even taken at face value: Every single data change should require careful planning. Especially if it's a schema change, and not just a query.

You can do a lot with generated code, refactoring, etc. Data is much less agile, so I'm a lot more conservative when it comes to that end. Never mind that with decent naming, table comments etc. it's a good documentation in itself.