That's not the same.
No, it's even worse: The autopilot / throttle did not even disconnect, which would have given a clear warning to the pilots.
The PRIMARY FLIGHT display showed an obviously erroneous radio-altitude of -8 ft for some 20 minutes. The procedures say that in that case the A/T must be disconnected for the approach. They noted the error, but didn't follow the procedures. The approach was NOT STABILIZED neither at 1000ft nor at 500ft, but they didn't abort the approach as required by the procedure. At one point the thrust levers commanded RETARD, and Flight Mode Annunciator, displayed in the PRIMARY FLIGHT display, showed that and kept showing that for a couple dozens of seconds. The airspeed, also shown in the PRIMARY FLIGHT display, descended below Vref, and kept descending for several seconds. At the same time, the pitch attitude, also displayed in the PRIMARY FLIGHT display was increasing to values well above the typical (and even the non-typical) ones for an approach, again for several seconds. The glide slope indicator, also displayed in the PRIMARY FLIGHT display showed the plane descending below the glide slope for a few seconds, before the stick shaker activated and the AP disengaged.
Pause. You know that, in PRIMARY FLIGHT display, the words PRIMARY FLIGHT are there for something. Ask any pilot, even flyboy, what are the most important tasks of the pilot flying during an ILS approach in IMC on autopilot and they'll tell you "to monitor the autopilot mode, the speed, the attitude and the ILS", all of which, not just by chance, are displayed in the PRIMARY FLIGHT display. You had three required crewmembers in that cockpit, and nobody was seriously paying attention to the PRIMARY FLIGHT display, and during an ILS approach in IMC on AP that means that nobody was flying the plane.
Finally, upon the sitckshaker, the FO, who was the pilot flying (sort of), correctly reduced the AoA and increased thrust, and that was effective to initially stop the stickshaker, but incorrectly didn't disengage the AT, which is one of the steps of the stall recovery procedure. A second later the captain called "my plane. The FO removed his hands from the yoke and thrust levers, and the captain put his on the yoke alone. Because the AT was still engaged and in RETARD, it brought the throttles back to idle. By when the captain decided to put his hands in the throttle it was already too late. He did set max thrust, but the plane struck the ground as the engines were still spooling up.
So you have an event that started several minutes before the landing, with the pilots not following the procedure for an approach with a failed radioaltimeter that they were aware of. Then nobody flew the plane during the ILS in IMC, and then they botched the stall recovery. They had plenty of opportunities to and time to avoid, detect, and correct, and they failed at them all.
Compare that with an unreliable speed event where there are a dozen of system failures, error messages, warnings, and the plane changing from AP and AT to manual fight, with a control law that has just changed and that left the plane with no envelope protections, all at the same second.
The unreliable airspeed did.
I'm thinking a bit further back: What event caused such degradation of systems that airspeed became unreliable and the aircraft reverted to alternate law? A frozen pitot tube, hail the size of golf balls or damage to the horizontal tail?
Something like that. The strongest theory by now is ingestion of ice crystals.
As far as I know deep stall is only an issue with T-tails. Even if they did stall, why couldn't they recover?
This remains to be answered. We'll have more info on Friday.