Isn't it just arguing that one complex weighted graph was tuned to output tokens that more align with what current day users would define as 'taste'?

I don't think it necessarily says anything about a model itself having 'taste' in some subjective way.

If the fashion changes would the model update with it without retraining? No. So the model doesn't have 'taste' in that sense. It has alignment to current human definitions of taste.