What she is describing is the difference between being polite, and being good.
Knowing how to be polite is an important skill for social decorum and practicing empathy.
But politeness is performative, it is "skin-deep"; and is very easily and frequently used to both hide and mask a conscious choice to _not_ do good.
For example, instead of helping you dig out your car, I could instead, politely, express empathy with your situation. Since our society holds politeness as a virtue, I can now feel good (and be socially rewarded for) having done a slightly good thing. The reality may be, however, that what I have actually done is selfishly excused myself from actually having helped you.
Bad actors exploit this phenomenon. And this is widely understood.
This is where "Thoughts and Prayers" comes from. This is why a Southerner saying "Bless Your Heart" is understood to be an insult (it translates, roughly to: 'you just said something stupid, so rather than engage with you, I'm going to use politeness to allow me to ignore you / your statement'). This is a large part of what Bo Burnham's recent hit "That Funny Feeling" was about. etc.
In my personal life, I have generally found people who exploit this phenomenon to be among the worst people I have to deal with, as people who are bad actors but lack the ability to be polite get filtered out pretty quickly, while these such people can persist and deal damage for quite some time.
I will take an impolite good person over a polite bad actor any day of the week. Though, of course, too many people without an understanding of how to be properly polite in close context is its own recipe for problems.