No, it does not. Maybe I should explain what I mean by “connects your character to the world.” I mean it explicitly grants you, the player, the right to posit established relationships with people and institutions and knowledge gained from your character’s years of past experience. The 2014 background features are full of phrases like “you can [expect to receive, call upon, find, secure, invoke, gain access]”, “you have [ties to, a residence, a contact, a rank]”, “you know”, “they will”, “people assume”, and “they defer”. The text of the UA sample backgrounds, in stark contrast, are past-tense accounts of suggested backstory with any indication of how past events might connect with the character's present place in the world left to be implied at best. The idea that it does the same thing because a DM, without any prompting from the rulebook, might grant a player the same rights and privileges is like saying a blank page supports building airplanes just as much as a set of airplane building instructions.