That's just silly. Plenty of new sites get significant amounts of traffic from search engines, and figuring how how to do better remains a viable marketing strategy for everybody. OK, it's a lot harder to dominate primary search terms than it used to be, lots of people with deep pockets, and a lot of favoritism by Google to the incumbents. But there are plenty of opportunities for creativity.
My site manages to get 1-3 search landings a day despite the bulk of it being less than 6 months old, and with me not knowing anything about SEO until very recently. Difficult, but possible. Sometimes it feels a bit like voodoo though. Most of the things I rank for are things I wasn't even aiming at.
The niche site I started as an experiment a few months back is actually doing better than the older site.
In my experience, the problem is the investors. Most investors in startups can't stomach the unpredictability, in timing OR payoff of investments in SEO.
In my case, it took 5 years of bootstrapping to hit 1M uniques per month from organic and 7 years to exit for 8 figures. If I'd had investors to contend with, my head would have likely been on a platter well before that.
