Well ... yes and no.
Yes:
All glas will absorb light.
All glas modifies light. I wear glasses, and despite the fact this is a multicoated single element single group optical glas lens, it already change the quality of the light I see slightly. Its visibly less brilliant. Adding multiple elements and of different types of glas only makes this worse.
Surfaces between two different materials will cause light reflections. This can be reduced, but not removed, with coatings. Especially coatings also change the light, because coatings are of different efficiency with different wavelengths of light. And coatings also have the issue that if the light doesnt hit it "right on", it changes in its properties.
Also obviously every lens element has to be manufactured. Optical glas aint cheap, bringing optical glas into the right form aint cheap, and lens coatings aint cheap either. Thus, obviously adding lens elements makes the final lens more expensive.
All these factors strongly suggest: work with as few lens elements as possible, use extremely tight tolerances, use the highest quality optical glas available, and use the best possible coatings.
But also No:
On the other hand theres about two douzens of possible lens errors; every lens has them, the only question is in what amount. The more lens elements you have, the more you can get these lens errors down. Thats why poor lens designers often come up with lenses with a ton of elements: they just try to compensate for all these errors.
And unfortunately wide angle, zoom range, internal focus, image stabilization etc are all features that will require additional lens elements. All these features can help you get the shot, though.
Thats why lens design is really more of an art than anything else. Which errors do we tolerate in what amount in order to get a great end result.
And thats also why many of the best lenses around have surprisingly low element counts.
For example the maybe best lens Nikon ever produced, the AI 105mm f2.5, has only 5 elements in 4 groups.
Or: A strong competition for that lens is the Nikon E-Series 100mm f2.8 (official name), which has even only 4 elements in 4 groups.
Or: Ken Rockwell claims that the AF 55mm f2.8 micro is the sharpest lens Nikon ever produced. 6 Elements in 5 groups.
Or: Ken Rockwell also claims these cheap plastic zooms from around 2000, like for example the AF 28-80mm f/3.3-5.6 G (6 Elements in 6 Groups) are absolutely awesome. I dont own any of them (yet?), so I couldnt say.
All in all I would say: there is no such rule that the lens with the lower element count is better. Certain features likely increase element count (wide angle, zoom, internal focus for fast autofocus, image stabilization). But ideally you use as few lens elements of highest quality and lowest tolerances as possible for the task at hand, because while every lens element can overall reduce lens errors, they also always reduce image quality in other ways.
Or in short: all lens design is a compromise. The quality of a lens is decided by its output.
