It's worse than other such planes. For instance, the accident on Qantas Flight 72 is superficially similar - faulty data caused the Airbus A330's flight computer to ignore pilot input and abruptly pitch down, injuring a number of passengers - but it really wasn't. The Airbus engineers knew that angle-of-attack sensors fail, so unlike Boeing they designed their system to compare the input from multiple AOA sensors and ignore bogus data.
Unfortunately, that comparison algorithm had a flaw - it got confused when it received spikes of invalid data with a certain timing pattern and erroniously used the invalid data. That pattern shouldn't have been possible. No-one has been able to figure out any possible cause for it even in retrospect, and they certainly didn't anticipate it. However, the engineers designing the system did realise that the flight computers could have subtle bugs triggered by specific data timing - so not only did every flight computer have a monitoring channel running independently-written code checking its calculations, that monitoring channel was intentionally not synchronized with the main channel or any other flight computers. This meant every time one of the flight computers acted on bogus data and forcibly pitched down, the monitoring channel calculated values so different that the fault detection disabled its ability to do so within a few seconds.
The maximum allowed authority and the altitude at which the system was enabled were also much more carefully restricted than MCAS, so it couldn't take such erroneous actions in situtations where the pilot might be unable to recover. Combine the two safeguards, and something like Qantas Flight 72 with a few passenger injuries but no crash was pretty close to the worst-case scenario that could be caused by this weird and incredibly unlucky issue.