An even bigger flaw with most academic research into parser error recovery is that the vast majority of syntax errors occur from modifying a valid program to produce an invalid program, but the recovery algorithms are oblivious to this.
All that said, it's surprisingly difficult to compare error recovery in an online parser (i.e. one that's parsing as you type) to a batch parser. In the worst case (e.g. load a file with a syntax error in), online parsers have exactly the same problems as a batch parser; however, once they've built up sufficient context they have different, sometimes more powerful, options available to them (but they also need to be cautious about rewriting the tree too much as that baffles users).