This is true, but there are caveats depending on the speciality.
I am a character artist at a big studio. I remember a thread on a professional forum where the number of AAA Character Artist positions were counted up (attempted too, anyways).
Anyways, the number is something like <1000 worldwide. Thats crazy odds. I probably have more than 1000 unemployed character artists as facebook friends myself. The average amount of time I see it taking to get a CA position in a AAA studio is probably something around 8-10 years. Broken down, thats probably 5-6 years of treading water while you get good enough to get work. Then 2-3 years of working as a freelance/contract character artist before breaking into a studio (because competition is so high for these positions, thats a pretty good number of years to be working remotely for cheaper than an in-house artist, before a studio is like, "yeah, this guy is ready).
That said, environment artist positions are vastly more achievable, due to the way the positions are handled. 1, they tend to be more technical than character art positions because environment artists tend to handle more engine side work, and 2, environments are a bigger task than characters, so studios almost always hire more of them.
For instance where I work we have 5 character artists and 25 environment artists (or something, they keep the environment artists in the basement so I've never counted them).
So yeah, I've seen people buckle down for 2 years and get in-studio AAA environment art positions, its definitely achievable. But so is being a character artist, there is just more competition.