I was surprised to hear him say this too.
His point was it was all hydraulic and all electronic. No mechanical back ups for anything.
Fly-by-wire is something else.
Fly-by-wire-only is potentially, not in all cases, but could be MORE redundant than hydraulic/mechanical backup.
Adding ‘backups’ to control surfaces doesn’t necessarily improve all situations.
The DC-10 in Soiux City had all sorts of backups, in the wrong place, and they didn’t work.
The MD-80 Alaska Air trim-screwjack was ‘redundant’ with the hydraulic control ram...except the nut on the screwjack was stripped and thus the system turned into a single point of failure.
If the single-redundancy FBW system has a 0.9999 failure rate, it’s probably safer than dual hydro+mechanical systems with 0.9999 and 0.997 respective failure rates.