Before computers that was much harder to do so you needed clever math tricks to "do it all at once," which gets you to all the analytical methods -- calculus, etc. Still all very useful! Just hard to teach to a broad audience. Downey really leans into the technical advantage to computers provide and thus can cover a lot of material before getting into complicated math.
Downey makes this statement because his premise is that if you know Python, you can use that knowledge to learn the concepts without the pure math approach.
For example, he will do iteration to calculate integrals rather than teaching integration. And he will plot statistical distributions using a Python library to explore and teach the statistical concepts.
He also has a book called “Think Statistics” that is excellent in this regard.