Well, if you peeled the bad art direction & moronic splitfocus diopters off TMP it was still something resembling TREK underneath, just that the characters were in a different place in their lives.
But if you stopped aiming every light at the camera in the Abrams, and also discarded the ludicrous brewery and the rest of the contemporary welds, you'd STILL have something that didn't resemble trek underneath.
So I would not concur.
It's the other way around. One of the two movies is closer to the original series in terms of mood and presentation, and TMP isn't it.
But TMP was made in 1979, so it gets a pass, I see.