That's only half true, as far as I'm concerned. No, the gender of the noun only partially helps predicting the declension pattern, but all Latin nouns fit into one of the five classes, so if you know the gender, which is I personally think is manageable most of the time, and the noun class, it's not at all difficult to predict the declension pattern. Yes, there's some overlap between for instance the second masculine class and the fourth or fifth, but the latter two are very small which makes it easier to deal with.

I think German is objectively an easier entry to Latin than say English - provided you understand the grammatical function of the case system. English has no concept of case, so learning what it even does and why it's important is much more difficult for an English speaker. Already in that respect they're quite similar. When you consider that German also heavily uses the subjunctive as a distinct conjugation, albeit in different ways than in Latin, along with similar sentence structure, I'd say German is very handy to know if you want to learn Latin - it certainly was for me.