Design is a bit of a fashion industry. Lots of people imitating each other. I'm not a designer but I know a few good ones and appreciate good design.
What I appreciate in good design is not only looking good but standing out from the crowd. The problem with imitating others is that you end up looking like everything else. It's not offensive. But also not remarkable or memorable. A lot of web design suffers from being bland and generic.
A few years ago we had an app and our designer came up with an intense shade of red that was slightly pinkish. He then proceeded to use that for our app icon. Net result: it jumped out from all the other icons on the phones apps drawer. The whole app looked fantastic but that icon was awesome. You could not not notice it. Everybody else was using fashionable blues and greens that literally everybody uses.
IMHO the imitation serves a function. Familiarity conveys a message associated with that familiarity, that is the nature of the brand(cheap or high quality, for young or for old etc) and the brands need to update their logos to convey the correct message as their customers churn(people grow up and then get old).
For example, if you are an expensive brand for people of age over 30 but under 50, 20 years later your 30y/o customer will be 50 and will drop out. Now you need to convey to the newly coming of age humans that your brand is expensive high quality one but they associate different styles and symbols with high quality than the previous generations and therefore you will need to re-design your logo to mach the new taste. If the new people don't associate the British royal symbolism with the stuff your brand stands for, you drop them and embrace contemporary symbolism, for example. Therefore, the source of the imitation is not really imitation but an attempt of different brands to capture the new symbolism.
In other words, If everyone drinks coffee in the morning it's not an imitation to serve coffee in the morning.
The expensive brands sell accessories and shoes for that reason. You have to have a model figure to wear a Chanel dress or a Hugo Boss suit, but everyone can do a handbag or shoes.
The way you put this makes it sound like the process of design you described does not create the ecology you described, but it does. Why do you think "the youth" have different tastes? Fashion is constantly being dreamed up by influential brands, and they attempt to impose their vision of the future in such a way that it will become the new norm. This process doesn't just happen by itself. At the same time, outsider styles emerge and become popular by virtue of doing something different and catchy, it is a constant pursuit of holding the banner and commanding attention by many parties. Those who simply chase the style of the day will always be out of the loop because by the time they deliver it's already the past.
Of course the process is not the course of nature but no single brand has the power to design it. Instead, politics happen innovations happen new brands and new lifestyles come and go and each and everything is designed bit by bit but there's a no grand design. There's of course a literature and know how that piles up and the new designs takes cue of those but still, there's no grand design. It just evolves over time as people respond to everything that happens with the world. It doesn't happen by itself as a biological process but it does happen by itself as a sociological process. The biology just defines the pace of it.
True. But this effect isn't limited to design. How many cookie cutter / copy-cat businesses (i.e., apps) do we see? The origin of lack of (brand) identity is rooted in the companies themselves and their leadership.
The irony? Avoiding risk is itself a risk. The higher your chance of failure, the more significant this risk (from self-commodit-izing).
Also maybe a symptom of chasing a quick profit in the short term over other considerations, such as product quality. So better play it safe so the valuation rises by the time the manager/designer/marketer has moved on to another company?
What I appreciate in good design is not only looking good but standing out from the crowd. The problem with imitating others is that you end up looking like everything else. It's not offensive. But also not remarkable or memorable. A lot of web design suffers from being bland and generic.
A few years ago we had an app and our designer came up with an intense shade of red that was slightly pinkish. He then proceeded to use that for our app icon. Net result: it jumped out from all the other icons on the phones apps drawer. The whole app looked fantastic but that icon was awesome. You could not not notice it. Everybody else was using fashionable blues and greens that literally everybody uses.