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No, that's not really true. Secessions are very rare, compared to how many secessionist movements there are; as a rule, the acceptance of a secession requires the acceptance of the country which the original seceeding country originally belonged to, and as one might imagine this doesn't happen that often. Somaliland hasn't been granted independence even though it has in practice functioned as a country for decades and is commonly seen as vastly more functional than Somalia. Why? Because Somalia hasn't granted it independence.
Yes, there's a counterargument - Kosovo - but it's the expection, not the rule, and the Western acceptance of Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence (which most countries of the world haven't accepted) was predicated on the idea that Serbia had been ready to implement an actual genocide there. The ex-colonial countries and South Sudan were different, since their independence was granted by the country's original owner, and Ukraine is not even in the same category, since the country it seceeded from - Soviet Union - doesn't even exist. (The idea of Ukraine as some sort of a secessionist entity from Russia requires one to purchase into Russian nationalist narratives generally.)
Here's how EU - certainly an organization that could be seen as one of the main pillars of modern neoliberalism - reacted to the vote of independence in Catalonia.
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