I don’t know, who truly gets to decide that?

The SPIDER-MAN UNLIMITED show followed the SPIDER-MAN show in the 90s, and started with the premise that Spider-Man was a long-established hero that everybody knew about, with a cast that everybody was expected to recognize, from the previous show, before shooting the web-slinger off into space.

So the inference was certainly that it was the same Spider-Man. By that same token, the production team was different–so who can really say.

I think it’s completely reasonable to proceed from that point of view.