No, that's a bad mangling of what Alex Kurtzman has stated:So far, my general stance on these matters has basically been "it may suck, but that doesn't mean it isn't canon," but I thought I heard something about the show runners themselves making noise about DISCO departing from the "real" timeline? Admittedly I haven't been paying much attention, maybe that was only in reference to the Discovery itself after disappearing into the void, or the future or whatever. Perhaps I got my information garbled.
"That’s the same thought process that went into jumping 950 years into the future. We’re now completely free of canon, and we have a whole new universe to explore."
The misunderstanding is on how generally Kurtzman is being here. Most people recognize that he's talking about doing something different for S3 by having the ship thrown 950 years in the future of the Prime Timeline and so they won't be constrained to the canon of the TOS era any more. By S4 they'll probably wind up back in the TOS time frame. I disagree with the reasoning Kurtzman is using here, but I understand why he's doing it.
Also consider TNG S:4E:1 "BoBW" where Starfleet assembled roughly 40 ships to intercept the Borg in about six days time, with Klingon ships on their way, though apparently not arriving in time. Roughly seven years later, another Federation fleet of apparently comparable, though probably greater size engaged another Borg cube in ST:9 "First Contact" within roughly a day, remember this was amid growing tensions with the Dominion as well however.
I have to disagree with this somewhat. That correlation is probably more coincidence or bias confirmation than anything else. In TOS we saw far thinner deployments than any of that, though I think it's safe to say we can largely ignore it given some of the retconning that has occurred over the years since FX budgets and technology now allow for larger fleets and more diverse fleet composition or we can take what we've learned and apply it in that the Enterprise in TOS was on the fringe of deep space exploration as she apparently was during the Klingon-Federation war along with other vessels, only occasionally being brought back into Federation space proper for certain high-profile patrols on Klingon or Romulan territory or for special duties, like shuttling ambassadors to Babel. The Motion Picture unfortunately set up a perplexing problem in that Earth had no major ship deployments to intercept V'Ger, but fifteen years later did for the Whale Probe. At least in the Kelvin Timeline there were 8-9 ships that could be sent to Vulcan's aid. In the TNG-era, we see that the Federation got a bad case of arrogance and complacency which the return of the Romulans and the initial encounters with the Borg soon shocked them out of. That also ties back into 2256 with a similar arrogance and complacency the Federation was suffering from that nearly lead to its defeat at the hands of the Klingons.
This is nothing new from a fandom point of view. The Federation seems to at times become a victim of its own success and becomes too ideological for its own good, even if Section 31 has apparently been there from the earliest days to try to keep that curbed. Not enough ships because ideology over being peaceful explorers in good times takes over and all the ships get dispersed to the four corners of the Alpha and Beta quadrants, then crap goes down and everyone has to be brought back for defense for a period time and Starfleet gets all military as we saw post Borg and Dominion contacts. The calculations on the TNG-era fleet sizes were done based on the 30,000 Dominion/Cardassian ship number calculated from the being outnumbered 20 to 1 statement in Deep Space Nine. But that was at a point of time near the end of the war and after the Federation was nearly 3 years in and had suffered horrendous losses. So after all those years of fighting and the Federation still had a fleet of at least 10 thousand ships of uncertain composition is mighty impressive.
-Mike