It's not about risk aversion. There's just not enough money going around. US is a big country so obviously if 1% of your capital will be allocated to high risk VC it's going to be a much more substantial amount.
They're not really wrong though. Unless you really know what you're doing you will lose money, as evidenced by the fact that most VCs do in fact lose money and venture as an asset class sucks.
They aren't wrong but salaries are too low; you can't really bootstrap unless you're doing a side business and then you're effectively working two jobs. There's no YC in Canada or at least it's harder to get some funding.