The friend is absolutely correct for an infrequent east-coast traveler who isn't familiar with how Alaska Airlines works.

Not everyone monitors their emails to preorder food, or has the app downloaded to get the notification about it. In this case, they will absolutely be stuck without food on a 5+ hour flight.
Similarly, people might think that Alaska has seat-back tv similar to Delta and not have any media downloaded on their ipads etc. And unless they have tmobile they wouldn't have free wifi either.
Also if coming from the east-coast, the frequencies of Alaska flights are much less, so any irrop situation can easily derail the whole trip by 1-2 days.

Alaska Airlines should definitely offer free wifi and non-preordered food at the very least if they want to be comparable to delta etc (to offer "frills")