Your colleague is dumb. Stored procedures have advantages and disadvantages. For certain data processing operations it is much better to perform everything inside the database than transfer large amount of data back and forth to some external application.

But I have also seen organizations with the policy that any operation touching base tables should be encapsulated in a stored procedure. This makes development extremely cumbersome, especially if some DBA is gatekeeper for the stored procedures. Something like this might have burned your colleague.