What they most likely meant was that the entity bean programming model was cumbersome to work with. That was certainly the case in EJB 2, but has been changed so substantially in EJB 3.0 and 3.1 that this criticism is no longer valid.
On the other hand, many people have found that the combination of a
servlet container with an ORM solution like JPA or Hibernate goes a long way. While EJB has numerous features beyond what a servlet container can provide, for pure web apps it may be unnecessary.