Surely if your app's sole source of success is a spending a short amount of time on some website's front page, you have bigger issues with your business strategy?
Go back a few years and everyone used to talk about their struggles getting featured on TechCrunch; I didn't believe it was make-or-break back then either.
He is just pointing that game is rigged and a lot of articles promote how egalitarian everything is, how it is meritocracy. As someone also pointed out, there is somewhat similar thing here as well, just, I feel it is more clear what is happening.
A big challenge super early companies/products have is getting eyeballs on the product. PH can get you thousands of users with little to no effort. So it's not about your product living or dying from PH, but it can take startups months to get that kind of feedback from users using the product. It won't determine success, but can certainly put you on that path.
We ended up being featured on PH's front page after one of these "insiders" found us on twitter, and posted us. Had no affiliation to us. Got hundreds of upvotes, and thousands of users to try our product out. Over time we lost all our PH users, but the feedback from them was awesome, and is likely what has kept us around 6 months later.
So not the sole reason, but definitely a significant one.
Go back a few years and everyone used to talk about their struggles getting featured on TechCrunch; I didn't believe it was make-or-break back then either.