It actually wouldn't surprise me if they optimized for bar/qr code readability. I wrote something years ago that used industrial cameras to read QR codes as well as very precise metrology features. I had to optimize the optical/lighting setup for the feature measurement and then wrote some finely-tuned operations to identify the QR code, window down to the code only, clean up edges/features with expensive convolutions (mostly median filter) and then finally read the code. None of this was visible to the operator, but if you saw the final image of the QR code it was essentially binary color space and looked a bit cartoon-like.