He's not wrong ... Before the advent of the Tahoe Local pass (which I bought the first season or two it was available, and continued buying until my dad died and we no longer went to the Sierra foothills on a regular basis), I took my daughter to Tahoe Donner multiple times when she was a beginner. Their private lessons for kids were a steal, too. I also did season-long leases on ski gear for her, until she finished growing and then bought her new boots and handed down my skis. (And while the season lease savings were great, not having to pick up rental gear each time we skied was priceless.)
But where we live, skiing is rarely a day-trip. Realistically, it's a six-hour round-trip to West Virginia, or McHenry, MD and not quite as far to Wintergreen. (Whitetail is a feasible day-trip but it's not a favorite.) So that means covering lodging plus food if not staying in a cabin/AirBnB with a kitchen. The lift tickets are cheaper, but the ski experience is not Tahoe or Colorado/Utah, either.
And passes require you to front a lot of money to the resort industry. I will do it, but I don't expect a casual, maybe once-in-a-while skier to make that kind of season investment. And not everybody can pay that much up front anyway. Back in the dark ages, when I was a teenager, you could get discount tickets at ski shops and grocery stores. That feels far more accessible to someone just trying it out.
And can I just say, telling people to pack a lunch just rubs me wrong ... sure, you can do absolutely do that. But it often was a win to have breakfast and get me, the kid, the ski clothes, and the ski gear up to the mountain in time for ski school. I would have felt like mother-of-the-year to manage to pack a lunch too.