This is not the same thing as the hypothesis. You're saying that language is going to be correlated with world knowledge, but that both are a result of the environment that those people are living in. Environment -> Language, and Environment -> Perception. This shared causal relationship induces correlation between Language and Perception, but does not conclude any specific causal relation between those two.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesises Language -> Perception. This is a meaningful additional causal relationship, which is very hard (but perhaps not strictly impossible if you don't care about ethics) to find evidence for.
The cited weaker version still suggests the same causal Language -> Perception relationship, but allows the influence to be weaker in some way.
From my understanding S-W is focused more on the languages as conceptual symbol systems and not on the real world lived experience. In other words, sure, languages may be somewhat equally capable of expression, but if you live in the desert your culture and language is going to be lacking when talking about rainforests.
This seems to be in line with the Wikipedia article:
Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity: that a language's structures influence and shape a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity