He looks to hold up play and control possession more, but he's still at heart a creative player who looks to interplay and exploit space. You stick him on the wing against a team who sits back and you'll see him struggle too - it's happened for them plenty of times. It's why we were so often lauding Toure for powering through and saving them last season.
The bit in bold could be said of Sterling, and we'd never claim he was similar.
It's one of those cases where in theory they
should be similar, and it's easy to just say they're similar.. but they actually aren't.
Silva's positioning is completely different, because he's much better at shielding the ball, and at skipping past a man from standstill. He's more patient by nature. He's more likely to exchange a few deep passes before assisting the assister, whereas Mata is more likely to directly assist the goal. Mata is a much better finisher, and gravitates towards goal a lot more. Though he has tidy technique, he's essentially more of an instinctive player in a similar way to Rooney, which couldn't be said of Silva.
When you break down the limitations and weaknesses between the two, Silva is significantly less likely to be made quiet than Mata, thus going back to your original point, the situation doesn't apply to them both.
People probably get bored with comparing the two, but you always have people claiming it's not down to Mata's specific limitations, and that it would happen to Silva too.. which I think believe is completely false.