That’s not the point. The point is that when I visit a website that exactly matches XYZ pattern, and am encountering sites exactly like it multiple times every day, I’m left wondering whether the sites are trying to say something new and interesting. What ends up happening: the many slop variants have poisoned my opinion on all of them. I can instantly identify certain AI slop Claude designs, and I instantly remember the many flashy, yet buggy sites I’ve encountered.

The “vibe” of a product is absolutely important. Do logstash and datadog have similar vibes in their log viewers? Fuck no. I can instantly tell I’m using something related to that tool because of its design language. That helps it stay sticky. If you’re datadog, you don’t want users thinking the product feels and looks exactly like all the other log viewers. You want them to think it’s unique and the best or whatever. Marketing sites extend that, and are absolutely a component of the “vibes” you get from a product before doing a strict engineering breakdown.

Terrible examples - they're both ugly. The honeycomb one is particularly bad because it's covered up with a cookie popup on the left and the chat widget on the right.

Yes they both have the same overall structure as the Stripe landing page but if you can't tell the difference between the level of execution of those three, then you're just arguing for mediocrity.