Odoacer was a career general in the Roman army, while "Romulus Augustus" was the kid of a former secretary of Attila. Odoacer took power with the benediction of the Senate and ruled in the name of the actual Emperor in Constantinople.

It's not any more or any less the end of the Western Roman Empire than the political troubles that occurred in the earlier and later centuries. The Gothic, Frankish or Vandalic kingdoms very much thought of themselves as belonging to a Roman world.