Yes, but only to a point.

Muhammad has been represented in images for a long time; most Muslims consider the practice to be taboo, but within various artistic traditions, there have always been representations of the prophet. Here, there is a similarity to the iconoclasm debates because when the issue arose, most Muslims decided to just take the safer route and not visually depict him or any of the other prophets (one won't find an image of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, or Mary in a mosque either).

Where it's different is that the iconoclasm debates, and the traditional debates about whether Muhammad can be depicted are arguments by people who follow a religious tradition about whether and how important figures within their own traditions should or should not be depicted visually by members of the same religious tradition to be viewed by members of those same religious traditions (sorry for being pedantic here, but I want to hammer home the point that this was Christians deciding how Christian saints should be depicted by Christians for Christians; and the early debates around depicting Muhammad were by Muslims deciding how Muhammad should be depicted by Muslims for Muslims).

The reason why I would hesitate to compare the more recent outrages and outbreaks of violence around depictions of Muhammad to the iconoclasm debate is that the context is rather different. The issue here is that what's being protested is non-Muslims depicting Muhammad for other non-Muslims, usually with a caveat to Muslims that any offense taken to these images or protesting them means that they (Muslims) are "more beholden to sharia law than to secular democracy" because (the argument goes) my freedom of speech is more important than your religious sensitives."

And a lot of these images aren't particularly respectful--and, in some cases, they're intended to be as offensive as possible because the whole point is to provoke and push that narrative about freedom of speech trumping all other considerations. They're images like: Muhammad driving a truck laden with explosives, captioned "What would Muhammad drive?"; or wearing an exploding turban; or so on.

This brings up a whole other set of issues, which is the long history of western denigration of Islam (particularly in a colonial setting), combined with a narrative that Muslims "don't belong" in the west as immigrants or can never fully assimilate because (it is alleged) that Islam and "the West" are fully incompatible (this is a narrative that comes from both conservative and anti-immigrant groups in Europe and the US, and groups like Da'esh and Boko Haram in the Islamic world).

So, from that perspective it's quite different, as the iconoclasm debates--nor the discussions among Muslims scholars over visual depictions of Muhammad--did not take place in that sort of context, whereas the recent protests and outbreaks of violence over Muhammad cartoons can't be separated from it.