I was at a research colloquium once and this came up in the context of dieting. The author of that research was making similar statements, although the focus of the research was different.

The problem I had with what they were describing was that they basically defined away willpower. That is, it felt like they basically said "once you control for all the downstream effects of willpower, willpower no longer has an effect." If you think about it, what's really the difference between saying "I'm not going buy cigarettes anymore or have them in my house" and willpower and environmental control?

There was more to it than that but that was the gist of the thing. They defined willpower so extremely narrowly that it didn't have the same meaning anymore, and it wasn't clear what would be left.

But it was several years ago and I haven't followed the literature closely.

I can see how just willing yourself to not do something, in itself, is probably not enough, but I'm also not sure how you can do that without it resulting in a whole set of things that collectively probably define the consequences of willing yourself not to do that thing. That is, removing something from your environment, or removing yourself from the environment, changing your attentional focus, finding something else to occupy your motivations, and so forth.