Utter nonsense. Laurel is a tree and will grow to 10m if you let it, and quite quickly. It will only stay at a defined height if you prune it regularly. We find our laurel hedge (which we inherited, I'd never have planted it myself) needs pruning twice a year. If you only did it once, it is quite capable of doing over a metre in a year, and then the stalks get too thick for the electric hedge clipper.

One advantage of laurel over cypress-type species is that if you do let laurel get overgrown, you can just cut it very hard and it will grow out again to the desired size. Whereas if you cut cypress hard you just get a brown mess that never looks good again - if you ever let it get too big you are stuffed. Another advantage of laurel is that you can maintain it at a small size. Our laurel hedge, which we inherited at 2.5m by 2m, is now 1m by 50cm, and you'd never know it was previously a monster. It is a lot easier to prune than our beech hedge. The hedge clipper does the laurel like a knife through butter.

There are all sorts of evergreen shrubs, not commonly grown for hedging, which are naturally slower, lower growing and could make lovely hedges. But they would take time to get there, and cost more to buy, since not normally sold in bulk for hedging. Things like Osmanthus come to mind. I've seen Sarcococca as a hedge, amazing scent just now. A small true clumping bamboo like Fargesia murieliae "Simba" is an unusual, evergreen, but very expensive hedge, which would be very low maintenance.