I don't think I'd clock the ramen one as AI, if not for the main image being AI generated.
And that contrasts to an extreme degree against the rest of the scene which flows extremely well, maintains perfectly color coordination, and so on. I think it's kind of like how self driving cars can drive phenomenally well but then have occasional failure modes like randomly driving head first into a concrete divider. It's not like that's bad driving in the sense of missing a nuance, but something that's just completely conspicuously outside the rest of its demonstrated abilities.
That said, the provided examples definitely are a clear step up from the "default" you'd get. Like how some bootstrap-templated sites did it much better than others, while the best made it nearly invisible.
If we think about that as the intended competition (and not websites corps spent millions on design/polish/copy), I'd argue that AI (model + coding agent + skills + whatever) is doing a better job overall. Most agencies don't spend enough effort in understanding what you want, or hire juniors and bill them as seniors. It's almost always late, overbilled, somewhat what you said you wanted but not really, and technically terrible.
The Neon Ramen example look really cool at first glance, but if you spend more than a second or 5 looking at it you keep finding visual glitches, inconsistent design, and elements which don't belong. It's nice for a brainstorming phase, but that's about it.
If you were to go with a buy-a-template you'd probably end up with a less flashy design, but at least it'd be consistent. Those templates are built by combining standard styled elements to create a bunch of common design patterns. Sure, nothing looks great, but nothing looks bad either!
If you don't really care about a website, going for a ready-made template is by far the safer, easier, and cheaper option. And if you go for something like Squarespace, you don't even need an agency at all.
There's a lot of detail, but most of it is decoration for the sake of distraction.
AI isn't good at understatement, subtext, or (ironically) elegant distillation.
Is stylistic ingenuity, breaking from convention, or leaving things out on a website for a Ramen restaurant chain a feature or a bug? I'd choose to go based on the quality of the food not how unusual the website UI is. The website is not the product.
I personally find navigating and ordering food on restaurant websites that don't use standard conventions a frustrating experience.
This summer I've noticed a lot of menus with AI generated images of food and I have not trusted a single one of them. If you are gonna pitch me with this thing that blatantly is not even tangentially related to your actual product, that does not give me a lot of confidence in your business. If they'd used a stock image of a carbonara I would be none the wiser, but the entirely fake stuff is a massive turnoff.
Some of the best restaurants I know have old timey bare bones websites because they've been around for decades, and it's an oddly good predictor of a place that has a lot of loyal customers.
If I saw a website that looked like the ones above, I would be immediately skeptical. Handmade but rudimentary says down-to-business no nonsense, shiny and nicely made by a pro says high effort. This stuff? It says slop shop.
The thing that really gets me about this stuff is - is all about the content, the actual content is what really matters, you need to have content that actually works, that people find appealing, otherwise you have dogshit. A staccato bullet point of marketing speak is dog shit. It’s nothing, it’s less than nothing, customers are repulsed by it, and rightly so. bad presentation you can sometimes get away with, but bad content? Almost never. And this is bad (LLM generated) content, at a glance.
And now it's tweetable!
seems AI to me. Humans were doing marketing slop this way before AI but it doesn't really matter if the slop is AI or human.