I'm not part of any stream so I wouldn't know honestly lol. I don't do much of anything on a bike for social reasons, or because I want other people to see what I have. Its mostly for personal aesthetic satisfaction and because I need a real bike and will take one over something that is in the shape of a bike (hi-ten) anyday.

I just like to do things by myself without having to think about these things all of the time.
I just know that marketing teams usually take everything that is visually or thematically appealling to people and try to make something in that sense.
Often times that borders on the unsafe as sometimes there is almost no regard for why or how the original products were made. Deep V's are laterally stiff, and actually pretty light for how much surface area they cover. They're made to be ridden.
A few companies copied it (Mostly mass parts distributors) and made a halfway decent wheel, but the ones that I see that are the grossest are the ones that come on the newer completes.

Marketing definitely has it's place, but sometimes it's kinda gross.

Also, I think that that's how literally everything happens. Even in penguin suit business situations.
I don't see a whole lot of innovation coming from people that did exactly what everyone else did.
Everyone told Musk that he as an idiot for starting a car company. Every innovation we've ever had comes from someone trying to do something differently.
But again, I'm probably not the best person to answer these questions, because I've never known what not different is. For someone to want to do somethign differently, they first have to know what it's like to be in a normal setting. If you've never had that and you've been screwing around on bikes since you were literally 12, then whatever that was is normal for you.
I think that people that want to do things to be "different" typically start from "normal", and that's what most mainstream marketing markets too. People that don't try to discover these things until they are in their late teens or early 20''s.