His version is a good example of when that phrase is true. I only just recently started the books, and the entire opening is a great example of it. There's dialogue that gets moved around, chronology that gets changed a bit and scenes added and subtracted but every one of them is aiming to communicate what took Tolkein 3 pages to exposit abstractly.

Now when people say "it has to be changed a little" they mean "we combined these two characters and deleted three plot lines so the whole no longer makes sense because hiring 2 actors is too expensive" (see Harry potter) or they mean some modern audiences bullshit