I've been hearing that for the last eight years and it has never been proven to be true, in real world benchmarks and $$$/performance by the time equivalently priced tiers of competing varying $125, $195, $250 and $350 CPUs are available for purchase.
We don't know yet whether Zen is as good as Intel CPUs, but the statement "You're thinking the old AMD architecture, which was quite different from that of Intel, and it sucked. The new Zen architecture is much more similar to that of Intel." Is absolutely correct, and is something that was not correct about any AMD CPU released in the past 8 years.
I used to only buy AMD. Im not exactly sure where they are up to now (probably about 8 years if not more since I touched them)
but i definately remember the bulldozer hype and subsequent flop. lies about the number of cores and other things that just made me say "my computing is to important to my life to play that game".
I was also privy over the years to some test builds of machines including head to head amd vs intel. it is truly painful to say that not only were they often more expensive (new) for the performance, they were also horribly unreliable, pausing, and doing all sorts of stuff that made us sad.
hope thats changed, but saying there is any similarity between the current in use intel vs amd range is very far from the mark.