The author's alleged misdeeds aside, even before AI, there were lots of small projects that were similar to one another.

I don't think that's a bad thing, or that it's necessarily plagiarism - unless the LLM spews out the other project's code from its training...

I'm happy to see multiple takes on the same idea. There are lots of tiny aesthetic and functional decisions that make apps different from one another. Now that implementation is cheaper we should celebrate that.