I made the statement. I also said there is nothing wrong with being an amateur. We were all amateurs at one time and I am one now, save for the occasional times I'm asked to do portraits for people I know or maybe something like a recording session shoot.
My point was that it's often (not always) possible to print without test strips if one has a lot of experience. It's very similar to photographers who shoot a lot -- like commercial magazine photographers - and who often don't need to use a meter for familiar lighting situations, such as sunny 16.
Many years ago I was fortunate to work at a professional architectural/commercial studio where I spent the first two years, all day, every day in the darkroom, printing all our b&w. Things were often for publication in magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and for national art and auction brochures. So the quality of the prints had to meet commercial standards of the day.
When you print a lot and are often dealing with properly exposed and developed negatives, it's easy to judge exposures. For example, you get to know that a typical exposure of a medium density negative is say 20 or 30 seconds at f8. Then, just by looking at the next negative, you can see it's roughly a stop over or under exposed and can adjust accordingly. Normally you set development times to give yourself some leeway so you can develop a bit longer or shorter to compensate for minor errors in exposure.
The goal at many commercial studios was to be able to make very good prints quickly and to be able to repeat the process as many times as needed with almost no perceptible variation between copies of the same print, compensating on the fly for exhausting chemicals.
So, the normal procedure with a good negative was to make one full print at what I thought was a correct exposure based on the density of the negative. It was often correct. But if not, usually the next print was the final.
By doing it that way it's possible print very quickly, which can be important in a commercial setting where one's time is much more valuable than paper. That may not be true today with increased paper costs, and where it's a hobby (nothing wrong with that), done more for fun than to generate revenue.
Again, just to be clear, I'm not denigrating amateurs (we were all one once and I am one again today), just making the distinction regarding the ability to judge print exposures on the fly versus wanting/needing to make test strips.
edit: The above applies to 8x10 and smaller size prints where the paper costs were low. 8x10 was by far the most common print size. But If we were making much larger prints, we would do tests before exposing the full sheet because of the increased paper costs and because exposure times change drastically with larger print sizes.
