serious_angel is not contending with you that the design is bad, or that it is bad because it is unoriginal. In fact, they are not even specifically calling out the design.

They have noticed the design, recognized it as the output of an LLM, then proceeded to discover that an LLM was involved in much of the creation of the project. This is an academic project. Whatever the pedigree of the researcher is, this implies to the grandparent that the final result of the work may be amateurish or worse, to an extent generated. Therefore, he's concerned that it puts the legitimacy of the research outcomes (e.g. completeness, contents of letters, classification, maybe even hallucinations in the thesis proper).

Preemptive arguments:

1. "The author's a researcher, not a programmer; therefore it's fine to use an LLM. It is preposterous to ask each researcher to learn web development to publish their research." You are right, but given the amount of vibe-coded websites we see, and them all having the default (Astro?) style, the grandparent all the same has the right to associate that style with untrustworthy crap. I'm not saying that this academic website is necessarily crap. However, I think it's useful for the grandparent to share their sentiment, because the researcher might not know.

2. "A lot of pages have links to sources; you could verify the legitimacy yourself". perhaps, but doubting the veracity of research is a bad first impression, isn't it?

It's a bit sad, because the website is non-trivial, and would have taken quite a bit of effort without an LLM. But it is difficult to separate webdev enablement with the rest of the LLM baggage.