It is actually a rational choice. It is a defense against extremely bad experiences.

A personal example from a few weeks back. My SO booked a hotel for a weekend as a birthday present. We went there, it had a fantastic spa, dinner was delicious, the room great, clean, and so on. Individually designed, well thought out, friendly staff.

Breakfast came around and the coffee was abysmal. Really truly abysmal. What did we do? While eating breakfast we looked for a McDonalds, as we know for sure, that regardless where you are - you will at least find an okay and drinkable coffee at McDonalds. It is not a great coffee. And will never be. But the likelyhood is very low that you will find a shit coffee.

Marriott is basically the same for hotels. Or MotelOne in Germany. It is the power of brand - you get a solid 7 out of ten. And to be honest - when I am traveling for work, this is all I want. I want to know, that I will have a clean room, a bed that is good to sleep in. And the knowledge, that I will likely wake up rested the next day when I have to be at my best for my clients.

The risk of ending in a shit-hole got smaller because nowadays people write their experiences - but on the other hand, having seen how many of my reviews were being deleted by Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor and the likes because some lawyer requested it - I don't give a rat's shit for online reviews.

The 'real world' analogy is much simpler: standards.

Canonical UX patterns are generally beneficial and most 'design' attempts are well-meaning dark patterns.

Xerox figured out windows, scroll bars, buttons, groups in the 1970s and most web interfaces are STILL not up to that standard!

Heck - they're not as good as Visual Basic apps from the 1990s.

Largely due to lack of design discipline.

McDonalds. Homogenous everywhere in the world. US, Italy, Japan, Brazil, same stuff.

Good pizza in Italy, goos ramen in Japan, grilled Picanha in Brazil, that's why you go there and want it different/original.

But in software UI this is often overdone. I want the pizzazz in my audio software in what it produces, not in how the UI looks like.

Especially americans? The popularity and demand for homogenous american products and services (and other similarly homogenous things from other countries) overseas shows that it's not just "especially americans". What point would that even make? If anything the amount of people and customers of such things worldwide could easily outnumber just the people who live in one country, even as big. Desiring a level of service is not really a "uniquely american" thing. Perhaps there's also some impression that there's some "international homogeneity" that blurs things and makes it seem like it's coming from one place (even though it's a mix), but seemingly "cultural and local" things in other countries can be no less homogenous. Going from one japanese ryokan to another you're gonna experience the same level of homogeneity.

I think this is a fairly limited view of design, that's commonality in branding and somewhat layout.

Real design would be changing how beds, showers, toilets, keys, etc etc work.

Yes there is familiarity in the truly banal, but progress in design happens when we really question how things work.

Good homogenous experience is the hallmark of good design. There are no surprises with good design. It just works the way you expect it to work. Good design should not generally challenge your expectations.

Trade-offs.

Personally, if I had to go to Phoenix, AZ for work and stay at a Marriott hotel, I think I would rather convince my boss that this business trip could be a zoom call, and during that zoom call I notice that participants have all sorts of fun virtual backgrounds, filters, emoji in their statuses etc.

Because it turns out, the type who don’t want fun little differences are exactly the types who will gladly go on a business trip to Phoenix Arizona and stay at a Marriott hotel.