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Not true at all. In show business luck and 'who you know' are tremendous factors. Houston was 'discovered' by Clive Davis at Sweetwater's in NYC where she was a back-up singer for her own mother. That put her on the road.
If she were not family-connected she would not have been singing back-up for Cissy and would not have been 'discovered'.
It didn't hurt that her aunt was Dionne Warwick either.
Anybody who has spent time in either music or film can tell you tons of stories of remarkably talented people who never had the connections or got the break.
Well, yeah I guess you can say there are thousands of people out there better than anyone you pick that just didn’t “get their break”, but then again anyone can toss out an anecdote. If someone was as good a performer as Whitney Houston, they’d get a break, unless they were just totally incompetent or uninterested in succeeding.
Did she get a “leg up”? Sure she did. But the music industry boosts people due to nepotism all the time, and most of them fall flat on their faces (well at least, they did before autotune). You couldn’t rack up as much success as she did, at that time, without delivering a product the public wanted to buy.