No, this is way worse. With the 737 Max accidents I was willing to cut the pilots some slack and put a lot of the blame on Boeing because they changed the auto-trim behavior in subtle ways and didn’t tell anyone.
If the report is accurate, this is a straightforward split throttle / asymmetric thrust rollover. There’s nothing new here. Check me on this: Autothrottle on Boeings actually moves the throttle levers, right? Even if not, the problem at hand should have been obvious from a glance at the engine gauges. This is looking like a blatant failure to fly the airplane in the face of a minor failure.
Underlying it, of course, is there appears to be an equipment failure based on a previously reported problem. This speaks to a “live with it” attitude toward maintenance that also figured in the Lion Air 610 accident.