What he’s getting at is that you can build free links through liaising with other websites relevant to your industry. For example, I worked on a large production company website, and one of their outreach programmes was providing chess sets to local schools. Now, we spoke to the schools and got them to put a link on their website to us. We got a few links from .gov and .edu domains, and we paid nothing for the links.
I think what you’re on about is slapping links anywhere and everywhere for free. In which case, you’re absolutely right. But in the case of my free link example, that’s a link our competitors can’t get.