The statement could be interpreted inaccurate, but the objective of stopping endless spam is not "wrong."
We're looking at excepting some of the NFT tokens transfer operations to start. That likely solves your specific problem in the immediacy. The long term however is almost certainly going to include a fee whenever there is a multi-tx transaction unless an account has subscribed to the multi-tx exception list. We'll hopefully have constructive comments during an open period of discussion following the V1 implementation regarding how to do this.
RE: Hive Engine Update - Transaction fees for bots