If your old ones had a white insulator and the new ones are blue inside then he is right. The old ones aren't rated for the voltage (just signal) and will deteriorate after time and start to corrode or burn the center conductor causing a major signal loss.
I hope that when he changed them he buffed the center conductor of the cable. I just normally use a knife and scrape it on the center conductor. It brightens it back up and takes the patine off of it. Makes for much less resistance.
I have also gone though my home, and pulled all the wallplates I installed years ago and replaced the barrels in them with the new ones. The nice thing is that you can unscrew the old ones and screw in the new ones to the same wallplate. At the same time, if I used the crimp connectors behind the wall (I wired quad shield but it was 10 years ago) I also cut those off and use high grade compression connectors. I'm converting everything to compression but the old barrels are find for normal RF CATV if that's the only thing on the cable. But I'm making sure that all my Sat cables are upgraded with the new higher rated dielectrics and all connectors are cut back and restripped and fitted with the compression connectors. So far, so good.