People keep quoting John's words out of context, giving the wrong impression about the intention of his advice. And, naturally, many people in the SEO community are slamming him over this out-of-context quote.
He was responding to a question about why someone's Ahrefs backlink report didn't show the same links as the Google Search Console report. And John's point was the guy was spending too much time fussing over links.
In fact, he was subtly implying that people shouldn't be using these 3rd-party SEO tools for their own backlink profile analysis. While it's true GSC won't show you everything, no SEO tool can show you what Google knows about or counts.
So focus on the things you can actually do something about.
"My recommendation would be not to focus so much on the absolute count of links. ... over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don't make your website better overall."