I think they might have been referring to needing to type the whole thing again. Back in the typewriter days, I remember drafting papers on pen and pencil until I was read, and then typing it out; occasionally switching to white out ribbons to fix mistakes. Word processors changed a lot of that, and big high school we could all type our papers in Word97 or Corel WordPerfect and print them out; no intermediate steps.

I suppose with a typewriter today, you could still just OCR the result using an old scanner you can pick up at a garage sale or thrift store for nothing, if you didn't want to re-type everything by hand.

R.R. Martin has said he still uses and old word processor with Word Star on it, to have fewer distractions. He transfers things over via floppy disk.