Well, I don't know if that's accurate, but who does the flight following? TEB tower? I don't think so, they're busy enough. EWR departure or local? I doubt that too, since they can't see you on radar and have better things to do anyway.
It's fine to request flight following if you're cutting a corner to go over the Gulf of Mexico or traversing a mountainous region, but to think "flight following" will help you in the zoo that is the Hudson Corridor is insane.
Imagine: a private pilot from the UK could come over here, rent a 172 and barrel down the Hudson Corridor keeping to the left, as he or she might be wont to do. No law against it. Other airplanes, if he's even on the frequency, are reporting local-knowledge points with shorthand names that those of us who fly around New York know, but there's no requirement that anybody else does.
So much of the discussion of this accident has focused on this or that measure of "control," including the red herring that the TEB tower controller was on the phone to his girlfriend, which had nothing to do with anything other than the fact that he chose the worst possible time he might have to discuss with his squeeze barbequeing a cat.
Can't anybody understand that there is NO CONTROL in the corridor, no approach, no departure, no ATC, no flight following, other than see-and-avoid and the basically informal procedures about position reporting that have been put in place over the years? Nothing wrong with that, it has worked for years.
Frankly, the only thing I'd wonder about is entering the corridor from the side. I've always considered it "a tunnel": come in at the GWB, exit at the SoL. And vice-versa.