That is a weird phrase.

I can only make sense of it as "musicians are so bad at playing together that we don't try". If say the bass player cannot play with others I'm going to record them playing each chord/note in isolation, and then use that as midi samples to track. Do that to everything and you get perfectly lined up music. If you can play together "good enough" then I'm not going to do that.

That's how I read it: "lost the ability to play together" -> "tracks recorded individually to clicks and perfected before mixing".