I believe the original comparison that the designers were making was just PHB to PHB.
I would honestly point to this as somewhere that 5E excels at: while there are technically fewer mathematical combinations, none of thst complexity added much to covering character concepts IMO, just added on bureaucratic overhead. And the Skill resolution system is different enough to make it less of an apples to apples comparison than it might seem ar first.
5E Feats are, by design, meant to be worth 3 or more 3E Feats, so this is not apples to apples.
A more apples to apples comparison is the number of Class options, of which the 2024 PHB will have 24 options, or Spwcies, where we will have at least 26 options (9 Species, with Lineages expanding it to 26) in the new PHB with rumors suggesting they may have added some beyond the UA test. Those are both far more central to any character concept, and the 3E PHB had 12 Classes without really having an equivalent to Subclass, and 7 Rave options. Being able to play a Tiefling Pau Warrior or a Goliath Elemetns Monk right out of the Gaye is more important than distinguishing climbing and swimming.
Less fiddley differences, sure, but that doesn't mean that more character concepts are necessarily going to be represented in the 3E PHB.