Most pension plans offer the possibility of a cash out or transfer of actuarial benefit to a 401k-type plan. Except in the case of accidental death where there genuinely is no time to do so, if you were sitting on your deathbed you could at least theoretically take the money and run. And most pension plans offer death benefits while you're active so the calculation may not be so cut-and-dry whether the pension is better or if you'd have been better off with an individual account.

But yes, you can certainly find individual cases where a specific person would have been better off with 401k for this or other reasons. My claim is that it's systematically better for almost everyone and better overall.