I think it's unintentional. People usually dislike any recognizable "AI look", but they do like other aspects which might have an unrealistic AI look as a side effect.

For example, Google's Imagen 3 usually looked a lot less fake than the newer Imagen 4, but the latter still scored higher on most benchmarks because it made fewer mistakes and had better prompt following capabilities.

A similar thing happened with Dalle-E 2 and Dell-E 3: The new model was better but also more fake looking.