My own experience (4 MacBooks Pros) and that of providing MacBook Air and Pros to a dozen or so staff (with 50 or so on non-Mac kit) leads me to conclude this statement is not true.
They are great as long as they work but no better in terms of longevity to equivalent kit from other manufacturers, at least in my limited, non-scientific, IMHO experience.
- M1 mba, 1 usb port dead.
- 15' mbp 2019, all ports dead. I have been told that the logicboard is dead, and they wanted 850 euro to replace it.
On about 2000 macbooks, 2000 thinkbooks and 6000 hp elitebooks, all of various generations, the macbooks scored best on reliability and best on 'how many tickets do these users create for our service desk'.
The cost savings are there. But obviously there was still a significant amount of issues with these laptops. They are not perfect, but they performed better than the other two families.
The big issue with macbooks is usually that if they fail after 3 years, they are an immediate write off. The others get repaired. Oh and those butterfly keyboard years were horrible and nearly stopped us from allowing macbooks apparently.