Side comment: I have recently used Claude Code to make a few sites for testing purposes. In the prompt I added "don't make it look vibe coded," and it worked pretty well: No purple gradients, bento box layouts, etc. Nothing spectacularly original, either, but probably enough to avoid accusations of vibe coding.

it's advertising their AI, not the talents of their humans :D

People are confusing the presentation layer with the content, just a surface layer analysis. Basically people are feeling so burnt by reading AI fluff that they make a rushed judgement.

Writing something by hand requires effort and signals seriousness. It's not unreasonable to take things less seriously when they come wrapped in low-effort packaging.

Sometimes that effort is better spent on other things.

It's not the effort or the lack thereof here that's the issue, but rather the message you're sending by using slop tools to create the design of the advertisement of your research. It looks cheap.

I'm sure that, at first glance, many more people would take this much more seriously had the authors gone with a style-less HTML page or something, and that'd require _less_ effort, not more.

I have heard this logic before, defending over-engineering the looks to hide a brittle backed. Both sides look very entrenched on their position, I lean more towards having a solid backend and see the polished frontend as a waste of effort, but I understand your logic of seeing it as professionalism. My point is that you are not sending only one message by using a cheap slop static html: some will see lazy and cheap people, some will see people focusing on the real thing with no time or willingness to make shiny sites.

You can make a simple and serious website pretty easily now. Don’t need the shiny part