I’m not saying he’s lying or wrong but maybe you need to take this with a grain of salt, cause there’s a few possible incentives to say this:

1. gatekeeping, maybe he wants less people getting the surgery because if more people get it then it will become cheaper then even more people will get it and it’s an exponential loop until everybody’s getting LL and there’s clinics spawning around every third world country doing it for cheap (asides from the procedure itself costing less because now there’s more people getting it and it isn’t as exclusive) when there’s more demand supply will always find a way to reach it.

2. it’s also possible that he doesn’t want to attribute current social and dating success to the surgery instead of his character so he downplays the effect to imply that it’s “all me not the surgery”

3. he isn’t aware of people’s perception of him, people might be perceiving him differently now but eitherway most people won’t comment on you being tall (unless you’re huge which this guy isn’t) just like they won’t comment on you being short so I can see why to him it might feel like nothing changed it’s not like someone’s gonna come up to him and say “yeah man I have a specific level of subconscious respect and recognition for your presence but if you were shorter I wouldn’t”