electrification of all transistors
If he is of a certain age, he may be half remembering early 3-rail NMOS devices such as 16 kilobit (2 kilobyte) DRAMs. These required 5V for I/O, 12V for the storage cells (to get adequately large signals on the storage capacitors) and -5V back bias to turn the MOS transistors off by default.
On these devices it was important that the -5V supply was present before the other supply rails. All the FETs were NMOS, acting as low side switches, with either resistors between drain and VDD, or NMOS FETs configured as passive current sources.
With these chips, if the 12V supply came up first, over 16000 transistors all turned on at once, consuming enough power to destroy the device.
The next generation (64 kilobit) incorporated a charge pump on-chip, t supply the -5V supply automatically.
I never encountered any actual CPUs with this requirement but it's possible the Intel 8008 (no that's not a typo for 8080) did.
Nowadays it sounds like a quaint myth ... and with rare exceptions (possibly some high performance FPGAs) it is.