I seem to recall many instances of the use of incorrect photos, and the earliest I heard of was in the The Guardian in the 1980s before the general decline in media quality and standards.
It's awfully tempting for a war photojournalist to pose the group of tearful women in front of the bombed-out building across town. Or for the celeb gossip reporter to collage together two photos without making it clear it's a collage. Or for the person colour-correcting a photo of a divisive figure to lighten or darken their skin.
And the resulting rules are complex and at times judgement-based, because posing subjects is allowed in some circumstances, collages are sometimes allowed, some colour adjustment is allowed, and so on.
Still, serious journalists aren't going to be illustrating their articles about US-Iran negotiations with chatgpt any time soon.
No-one knows exactly how said images ended up getting this sort of usage. Presumably some random journalist was on Google Images one day, come across pics that looked vaguely like what they remembered the games to look like, and just kinda went with it.
I also remember quite a few cases where fan-made box art mockups got accidentally used as the pictures of the real thing, and when the BBC used a logo from Halo to represent a real-life organisation.