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It can be true, but as you point out, you can't really do your own self-dentistry/surgery....even a haircut would be tough....and the original statement used that magic word "never"...which is my real problem with it.

Now, I know or I think I know what you mean vis a vis doing your own electrical work, and I do (and sometimes enjoy doing) those things myself. To try to make the discussion as simple as possible, if you were a $500/hour attorney who happened to have electrical skills, it's possible that hiring a $50/hour electrician could be a very costly use of your time. IF, you had legal work to do during that time! If you were an unemployed attorney then you saved $50/hour. It's also a consideration that a pro can usually do the job in about 1/3rd to 1/2 the time of a skilled amateur and maybe 1/8th the time of a beginner.

Of course, all the calcs go out the window if you do this work yourself and totally blow it, creating damage, or even worse, injury to yourself. (not likely for electrical, but an amateur can break legs doing, say roofing) And then you have to hire the "pro" anyway, sometimes at greater cost than if you hadn't lunched the job. Ugh.

The real skill, IMO, is knowing what you're better off hiring external help to get done, and weighing that against your own costs in terms of time, possible screw-up > redo at that painful price you were reluctant to pay in the first place, and your learning-curve time.

I will tell you what absolutely burns me up, though. It is the notion that you cannot really know the competence of a so-called professional you hire or are intending to hire without becoming nearly as skilled as that professional. Because without that level of astuteness or something like it, you cannot know if a good job is being done. Before it's done. So, you not only have to pay the pro, you have to invest what's usually a non-trivial amount of time (at no compensation) educating yourself in the very field where you're hiring the pro. In most cases, you don't even know sufficient questions to ask to find out if a particular pro is the one you should hire. The best you can do is to get references, obviously, but I've been well hosed by pros who came with a good fat book of refs.