I'm not really arguing the superiority except as a side effect of answering the question "isn't it the same?" No, it's not the same at all.
When irc servers go down or networks split, the users just hop on other servers if they actually want to keep talking with the same specific people they were.
The earlier comment posed the scenario of being high and dry when they needed to do basically support work with users.
If they don't care then they don't bother, but that doesn't change the fact that if the communication mattered to you, then you are not stuck the way the earlier comment said. You are only as stuck is you feel like. And not just because of the hyperbolic technicality that you can stand up your own new server. You could, but you never need to. There are countless servers already.
And there is no coordinated "mass migration" operation. The channel breaks, you just go browse a few other servers, or if it's exceptionally bad, maybe another network. It's effortless for each user. It takes 2 seconds. You're not trying 1000 other networks blindly either. You already know a few more popular/likely suspects to try first. And so does everyone else, and even when you guess "wrong" and go to dalnet and everyone else is on undernet, there will still be a channel on dalnet with a topic or a user telling you where to go. It's all just not a big deal. It took way more effort to write this comment explaining it than to actually deal with a net split and get back in communication with more or less everyone that was in whatever channel broke.