This is an oft-repeated trope that I have found to be neither true nor false . I'm not knocking you, by the way.
If you are able to have some slight directional edge, options let you leverage like a mofo with a limited loss. I had a 60% swing trade on near dated options from last week that I closed this morning. I only put up a few K and over a few days... well, anyway. I've done this for a few weeks now. Called it on Twitter ahead of time before I got banned so anyone from here who followed me saw them.
The only thing is that you have to be very smart about stop limits because near dated options can move fast. So if you're wrong, get out and wait for your next signal.
In short, people who say that don't use options for what they're most useful and just want to play the lotto. In that case, what you say is true.
