No, the commenter is grossly misrepresenting the facts here, as is the case with every other point being made in that same comment. The patch in question disables the ability to fetch packages from online sources, requiring you to specify the URL of the required packages and its hash beforehand. Plus, it's not even meant for general use and instead is meant to help with packaging for Nix. For general use, you can very easily use the unmodified build instead.
I'll admit (although it annoys me) that I couldn't follow what was going on there. Nix x Erlang's gnarly build system seems like complexity junkie crack to me, but then I'm getting older.
I too initially assumed the commenter was being honest, and it took me a while going through code, commit history, and GitHub issues to realize that this wasn't the case.
Yes, really. This PR partially reverted this behavior (or rather made it less intrusive): https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/54115/files , but from there you can easily track "rebar3 hermecity patch", which had introduced it.