I assume this is happening all over the place, because I’ve had the same experience.

The fun part is extending it to internal development at corporations. Company A thinks they’re doing interesting competitive work, but are actually being quietly shepherded to build exactly the same things in more or less the same ways as their competitors.

The weirdness of human individuals (even setting aside amorphous concepts like “taste”) is an asset because it provides occasion for actual differentiation, and that noise may turn out to be necessary for the emergence of value in the long run.

I am not sure we always need a retraining. Even that can potentially be done but putting it in a knowledge graph can be quick. We don't know the exact workings. I understand the shepherding logic you are explaining and I have felt the exact things when writing code recently because the best thing to do is often unique in coding circumstances. But a random phrase being repeated in 2 days has a much lower probability.