Yes, the new channel, even with the bridges in tact, is still much quieter. Here's an sample from my client logs:

$ wc -l tcl2023* | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s/NR}' 116.333

$ wc -l tcl2020* | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s/NR}' 314.556

Less than half the activity before/after according to this non-scientific analysis (my client wasn't always connected and it looks like the logfiles contain topic/names and other output).