I think he was referring to having the only method to alter frontend components is through the raw data which is XML. It sort of fits how things were done decades ago.

I'm not totally against it, but his point stands. Even C# and .NET with WPF has XAML data to modify directly, but it's much more robust. iOS puts a spiffy dev GUI in front of everything and tailored in a way that doesn't really restrict, but still allows the option to dig into the raw side of things. However, it's still very necessary to reference the raw data on AS, so much so that there's a UI for the raw data.