Once the herd starts stampeding in one direction, we get runaway processes - https://www.racked.com/2017/2/1/14441128/local-news-anchor-i...

Your link has nothing to do with genAI

It's industry standard procedure to tune your model to output a consistent distinct style, to prevent malicious actors from abusing it and presenting fabricated (but very convincing) images as real.

Credible source?

there is no source it is pure conjecture, but I would say that there are many many fine tunes available of various image generation models so it is clearly possible to make many styles. thus it must be a conscious choice on the part of a API provider to render by default to a distinct style. there are many plausible reasons they would want to do this. Surely, but I don't have actual evidence from the internal management processes of these organizations that they were doing this for one reason or another.