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There's a special circle of hell for places who make "plot-like" illustrations that are supposed to look like data visualisations but are just graphics. It's extremely deceptive.

TFA has a bunch of things which look like plots of richness vs cost but are actually just what a statistician would call "totally made-up bullshit"

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"There is a relation, and it should look like this" is a very common way for people to express themselves.

Your way would ban all the engineerings and most of physics from being created.

What you're talking about is a sketch, which is totally fine. What this website produces is a thing that is very clearly a facsimile of a plot. It literally has made an attempt to produce points of different sizes etc, to look like a bubble plot but it's not. It's just made up.

I think GP is saying that just lines on the same plot would have been less deceptive, whereas the plot that is actually there has fake data points. Readers are used to the former being purely imaginative, whereas the latter almost always means there's real measurement involved.

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