I completely understand the author here, because I'm actually also leaning more towards avoiding supply chain attacks than jumping on the latest CVEs.
It's just a gut feeling, rooted in 25 years of experience as a sysadmin, but I feel like a supply chain attack can do a lot more damage in general than most unpatched known vulnerabilities.
Just based on my own personal experiences, no real data.
I'll try to put words to it, but a supply chain attack is more focused, higher chance of infilitration. While a CVE very rarely is exploited en masse, and exploitation often comes with many caveats.
That combined with the current state of the world, where supply chain attacks seem to be a very high profile target for state actors.