I suspect the current flood is about equal to the 1927 flood in water flow, but not gauge height, as the 27 flood had many levee breaks that would have mitigated the flooding downstream of those locations.
I’m gonna see if I can find some flow numbers of the 27 flood. The science may not have been that exact back then.
I would imagine that the 1927 flood was much greater, and the apparent approach of the current flood to its dimensions is solely produced by the restriction of the modern river channel.
This idea is suggested to me by the substantial drop in the gauge height at Greenville due to the very limited release of water at Lake Providence. In 1927, the river was sixty miles wide in places, as we read. I’d love to see a MODIS AQUA image of that one.