No... Where did you hear that? There is nothing special about a coinbase output. It is still spent from in the same way.
Actually, there's something very special about coinbase transactions: it's possible for two of them to be identical, if they have the same outputs. Normal transactions cannot possibly be identical as they must spend different inputs, but coinbase transactions have no inputs to distinguish them. Identical coinbase transactions are problematic because only one copy of the transaction can be spent; all others simply destroy the coins. Miners have indeed accidentally lost money this way. OP is asking about the soft-fork
to make blocks with identical coinbases invalid, which I don't recall the details of.