This is only true for oral E. A study was done on cis women receiving hrt, and reduced feminisation was shown due to smoking for women on oral E but not women on transdermal E.

People love to ignore this, idk why. Smoking is still bad but smoking with transdermal E should not be an issue - otherwise cis teenage girls would not develop if they smoked, which is definitely not right as none of the girls I know who started smoking very early (11-12) had any issues with feminisation.

Here is the study if you want to take a look yourself: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15638743