It's not even unfair. It's just a heuristic that occasionally gives incorrect results. We and the author would have both been better off skipping the illustration.

The real problem is that "serious content creators" believe (as far as I can tell anyway) that they must have a cover image to make the article appealing or set the mood or whatever. They might even be right as far as the actually reader is concerned, but either way this is the real disease, and it's decades older than LLMs.