I like your philosophy. In fact, I think it helps in more than one way. When I'm comparing multiple projects, and they all have the same bland "MicroGoogFace" looking style, I feel like I've wondered into OpenAI's secret bot farm pumping out generic copy & paste versions of the same thing. When I see a page deciding to be unique with their design, I'm more drawn into giving them a deeper look.

By the way, I like your news site, never heard of it before, thanks! And for your thingybase, have you looked into adding something like PaperCSS [0] to try the whole "sketchy" look together? Although you may be opposed to adding any css libraries lol I don't know.

[0] https://www.getpapercss.com/