The "closer to the sensor" advantage of which your friend speaks has a lot more to do with the distance between the sensor and the flange upon which the lens is attached, referred to as the registration distance (or colloquially as the flange-focal-distance) for a particular lens mount system, than it has to do with the different distances to the sensor the rear lens elements for one lens or another made for the same lens mount in the same focal length range may have.

In your case that advantage is in the Sony E-mount's 18mm registration distance when compared to SLR systems such as Sony's A-mount, Canon's EF mount, or Nikon's F-mount that have registration distances of 44.5mm, 44mm, and 46.5mm, respectively.

The advantage of shorter registration distances, allowed by the lack of a mirror between the lens flange and the sensor/film plane, is that wider angle lenses aren't required to be more complex retrofocal designs when the desired focal length is longer than the distance from the sensor to the lens mounting flange. Even when the desired focal length is shorter than the registration distance and a retrofocus design must be used, such a lens has to be less retrofocus than a lens with same desired focal length for a mount system with a longer registration distance.

A retrofocus design is essentially a telephoto lens in reverse with additional elements at the rear of the lens. If I want to make a 12mm lens for a system that has an 18mm registration distance it doesn't have to be as strong of a retrofocus design as a 12mm lens designed for a system with a 46.5mm registration distance. Just as longer focal length telephoto designs get increasingly larger and more expensive, shorter focal length retrofocus designs get increasingly larger and more expensive the shorter they are relative to the registration distance for which they are designed.

If we want to design a 24mm lens for a system with a 44mm registration distance and we can't allow the lens elements to be "countersunk" into the camera body because there's a mirror in the way, then we have to use a retrofocus design.

If we want to design a 24mm lens for a system with an 18mm registration distance we don't need to be concerned with that because we can fit the lens in front of the camera's mounting flange without needing to resort to a more complex and expensive retrofocus design.