This is a sentence I’ve heard many times from PA providers who’ve hired me to mix. It was surely meant to provide comfort, but it had the exact opposite effect. In fact, I’ve always dreaded intimate acoustic events, and have developed several techniques for dealing with them.
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In high school, we had a fully produced concert every year that contained acts ranging from a full big band to three guys and two guitars. It wasn't my job to engineer the show, but since the music director was on another planet, I stepped in to help the engineer (at the engineer's request). The problem with having such a range of acts was that we could not really cater the ambient sound or the overall feel to the act and the venue. It had to be different for every act that went on stage. I will agree that mixing a three vocal mics and a guitar is just as hard if not harder than a twenty piece ensemble. In a large group, discordant noise can easily be lost in the mix without muddying up the sound. In an acoustic group, that noise is harder to hide. One of the differences between high school and professional gigs, though, is that sometimes the problem is not the EQ, or the shape of the room, or even the way the signal is routed. Sometimes high-schoolers just aren't good singers, and no amount of fooling with the EQ is going to make them sing on-key.
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