I think that quote comes partially from the perspective of someone who doesn't recognize the nature of the stakes because they're different, not because they're smaller - if it was really intended as much more than a snarky critique of academia.
It's not as if everything outside of academia somehow involves much higher stakes. You could basically dismiss the whole of Google or Facebook as being small stakes, following similar logic.
In industry, a breakthrough correctly capitalized on can mint you millions of dollars. If you start a company, it could be tens to hundreds of millions. You then are not beholden to an institution or grants and can do what you want.
Just because you have a reputation and livelihood doing something does not mean the stakes are big in the general sense. Otherwise every job would be high stakes for everyone and the term would be meaningless.
The quote came from a professor at Columbia University.
This is one of the fields that you can easily leave academia for industry or even switch to another academic institution with ease if things start to go bad. Nobody but your own advisor will realistically care about a retracted paper (especially if you do it before publication). And if your advisor does hold it against you, that’s not an advisor you want anyway.
Please, please, please, if you ever find yourself in this situation, just walk away. You are being paid less than a Starbucks Barista to stuff a tenure-track professor’s portfolio with rushed research nobody will realistically care about in 3 years (if it was even relevant to begin with).
A PhD will teach you how to research. 99% of the research that comes out of that process will be useless, incremental crap. Issue retractions, miss deadlines, whatever. The stakes in the CS academic game are so small a complete come-apart as a PhD student can easily be turned into an extended masters degree on a resume.