As someone who has served in various levels of government I can say this is usually a good instinct to have.

We often overestimate the difference between administrations on non-political issues. But understanding why that is helps us understand why this is different. https://twitter.com/matthewlee7/status/1253109675199016963

First, generally a new administration will put new folks at the top of agencies who will drive policy changes and set the agenda. However, the execution is left to the career professionals with their institutional knowledge that carries over from administration to administration.

When the agency needs to respond to something that wasn't planned, they lean heavily on these professionals. That staff of civil servants looked very similar under Obama to what it would have looked like under Romney or McCain.

Second, through that institutional knowledge and through structural changes, the government learns and builds from administration to administration regardless of party.

After Katrina, FEMA went through large structural changes to respond better in the future. Same after Sandy.

Those structural changes and lessons learned stay in place unless an administration ignores them or actively dismantles them.

Leadership obviously matters. An Obama response would be different from a Clinton response or a Kasich response or a Cruz response. But we generally overestimate the difference in leadership on things like this.

Looking at the other two factors, an alternate universe President Clinton would look similar to an alternate universe President Kasich. The professional civil servants would look similar between administrations. The reliance on protocols and structures would probably be similar.

The civil service looks very different under Trump. (There have been a number of good articles exploring this if you're interested in Googling.) The Trump team has also disbanded response teams that would have helped and ignored lessons learned from prior administrations.

Examples:

Trump fired and did not replace the pandemic response experts on the National Security Council.

The Administration also ignored a 69-page NSC pandemic playbook that laid out step-by-step best practices for responding to a pandemic.

These are actions that a President Clinton or a President Kasich (or Cruz or Sanders or Rubio or O'Malley) presumably would not have taken.

So yes, it is generally a good assumption that people are overestimating the difference between administrations' responses to unplanned events. However, this does not hold when the admin decimates the civil service, dismantles structures, and ignores previous lessons learned.