As I clearly explained, it being true to him personalyl does not remotely make it a truism that defacto happens whenever the game is played.
He portrayed it as such.
That is wrong.
Actually, what I said was /if/ you depended on the melee character to beat down monsters, you'd have to heal him a lot, even every-other round, if not every round. But, it's a huge 'if,' because 3.x tended to slide quickly toward caster dominance. So, out of the lowest levels, you can depend on the casters to bring the monsters down, and the melee guy is just a blocker - he takes damage for a round or so, depending on initiative and the powergaming mojo of the players with casters, and gets healed up between combats with Wands of CLW. In that case, in-combat healing can be fairly rare, mainly because combats tend to be very short. Freed of in-combat healing, "CoDzilla" becomes free to focus on offense, such as pre-combat buffs or SoDs.
Some groups, I'm sure, left Clerics in the traditional band-aid role and never saw them get out of hand. 3.x spontaneous healing let them step in as needed to heal, and when that wasn't immediately necessary, actually do something else now and then. It was a step in the right direction, but 4e, with healing surges and minor-action heals went a lot further towards making the Cleric both consistently balanced, and a good deal more interesting to play, not to mention opening the door to a broader range of healing-capable classes, and at the same time, making the healing aspect of the leader role less central, and even to some degree dispensable. Doing without a healer in 4e is possible - not easy, and the DM should exercise some restraint here and there, but entirely possible.