I personally wonder if the writing (and coding) smells are being leveraged for watermarking/steganography. Like, if it's quirky but intentional; they're biding the time, leaving breadcrumbs so they can more effectively sift new internet content, or perhaps tracing/de-anonymizing.

I can also see how it is not necessarily the case, since all models seem plagued by having unique cliche patterns. We all seem to experience the writing smells from the same models. I see 'cleanly' a lot less from GPT 5.5 vs <5.4