Yes, it's quite similar. It's not THAT amazing though since it's just a convenience function over pdb.set_trace() which has been in the Python standard library for a very long time (2 decades or more).

Out of curiosity, I looked it up. According to a 'git annotate' of pdb.py, "def set_trace():" was added by Guido van Rossum on 1994-08-01 at 11:34:53 - almost 24 years ago.

Yeah, the main advantage seems to be that you can configure the debugger to use externally (I often "pip install ipdb" just to use IPython's shell instead of the default).