That sounds similar to Wirth’s Law. In general the more efficient a computer’s hardware is, the more bloated its software will be, so the slower the whole system will run.
While certainly related, I think GP was suggesting more that the same idea also applies to ease of development rather than raw hardware power.
I think that the raw-hardware-power aspect is actually a special case of ease of development - in that case, it's the ease of not having to think about low-level consequences of your abstractions or spend effort on optimizing your code!