It's not true. You can check it yourself ingame, by changing r_lodbias to different values, while standing in front of a player.
With a high lodbias you will get the simplified player model you normally have from a distance, even in close range.
He said cod takes more resources than et. He probably just thought 'et is old, so it uses less resources', so it was (probably) just a guess, he (probably) didn't do any kind of benchmark nor checked cpu or gpu usage in any way. My comment was just about that, I didn't want to go into details.
p.s.
your low graphic config has some cvars which are limited in many servers (etpro especially), for example r_subdivisions and r_lodcurveerror.
r_simpleMipMaps 0 is slower than 1
p.p.s.
quote properly, don't edit my posts