I don't really agree with this. Jordan didn't approach his world in a way even similar to Tolkien. Tolkien's world building was essentially poetic, an deeply rooted in poetic motifs and notions, from the power of words to the beauty of nature. It's grounded in notions of a golden age. Tolkien also closely imitated the mechanisms of myth in his world building.

Jordan's world building is purely cartesian, and belongs far more with (and was inspired far more by) the approach of SF writers than Tolkien's. There's nothing of the romanticism and poetry of Tolkien in his approach (that others than Jordan have tried to imitate). Jordan sought to create logical patterns, his world is built with the use of logical grids... the presence of A and B should logically make C emerge in this culture, and so on). His cosmology and his magic system are rooted in scientific and para-scientific notions - not all of them from pure and applied sciences, he went also to psychology theories, historical theories, philosophical theories and so on (even for his taoist elements he went to theories like the ones exposed in The Tao of Physics, connecting ancient beliefs to modern physics). Where Tolkien went to poetic notions like having a world becoming real from the voices of angelic beings, Jordan was turning to quantum physics than reverse engineered his features so they would have the appearance and "mood" of Fantasy (one small example is his Portal Stones, something inspired by Quantum theories and turned into something no longer understood that was turned into magical artefacts totally natural in a fantasy world)

Jordan's references to myth are essentially a sugarcoating. He's not adopted their mechanisms the way Tolkien did, and has rarely followed the "logic" of myths. He's pushing into the Fantasy realms notions such as Eliade's about cyclical time, and as logic thus dictated, he found ways to turn elements that one day will become myth in our reality into tangible truths in his contemporary story, from villains whose name will eventually be twisted in those of demons in reality's myth to bio-engineered black monstrous dogs that one day will appear in folktales, and mythical swords that are actually high tech devices that work along scientific principles and so on, and he similarly reverse engineered myths and other references. There are no myth in WOT. Myths are shown as historical truths that degraded into legends that turned into myth. Not everything is explained, but Jordan makes clear that everything could be rationally explained.

Tolkien aside from the evolution of languages, didn't use any science as his inspiration, but the poetic tradition. Jordan's world is one of speculative fiction, in the vein of science-fiction but used in a Fantasy context. He didn't seek to imitate Tolkien in creating a mythology, he sought to give the Fantasy genre a world in the tradition of SF writers like Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Pierre Boulé and so on.

Aside from the manichean central core of WOT, Jordan didn't share many themes with Tolkien (his nods to Tolkien's core themes came mostly from the Ogier), nor did he used them in a similar way. Tolkien was again mostly intuitive and poetic in his use of themes. Jordan's themes are, for the most part, developped by introducing motifs in a nearly mathematical (or musical, which is a bit the same) way. A major motif for one character in WOT systematically will have an important variation for a second character and be a minor theme for a third. There's a mechanical underpining to it all. Jordan's themes are also much more modern and far less focussed (WOT is a huge melting pot of themes). It's a solid departing from Tolkien and his glorification of a lost past and pre-industrialized world.

Jordan isn't so different from the others in the first post-Tolkien generations. WOT was one the early attempts to break away from Tolkien rather than imitate him. Jordan was one of the earliest to attempt it, and didn't go as far as younger writers would start doing a few years after he started his series. Behind WOT, there's still the big manichean epic, Jordan mostly sought to use it in a series that would have a wholly different tone and focus, a kind of historical saga borrowing heavily from the tropes of other popular and genre literature traditions with epic events still at its center, where Tolkien was still writing a traditional epic. Jordan was already an attempt at rejuvenating a genre that had turned in circles after Tolkien (and still remains there with some like Tad Williams, Brooks and so on) by mixing into Epic Fantasy several other genres, from feuilleton à la Dumas to western epics à la Louis L'Amour to social comedy. Heck, there's even simili-murder mysteries in WOT. Others after Jordan, like Martin, have furthered departed from the Heroic Epic, but with essentially the same idea of mixing it with other genres to make it fresh. The next generation pushed that notion further, eventually for some getting rid oompletely of the manichean central epic, which writers like Jordan and Martin haven't fully done, and others like Erikson or Sanderson in Mistborn have skirted around, by letting believe there was a central manichean opposition and revealing along the way there wasn't really one. Jordan and Martin in the 90s were already at the phase "epics are fun, but it's hard to renew it after Tolkien so let's try not to make it the central piece and give a different focus to the series... the stories of a whole world during epic times, and a character and adventure driven story, or a war chronicle that would draw only minimally on mythology as some epic conflict is still brewing in the background instead of just rewriting LOTR with a slightly different setting". After them it's reached a new stage, where many writers thought of inventing new forms for Fantasy that would get rid of the central conflict, or the hero's journey, altogether - and created Fantasies that are also more and more divorced from mythology.

But I think Jordan is hardly the most Tolkien-esque of the modern writers. I would cite Terry Brooks, Tad Williams, to name but two, who are far more "traditional".