I don’t want to believe that hundreds of actual people are independently stealing and making variants on this one artist’s work to get fake internet points…

The really sad thing is I can believe that there are hundreds of people that are doing this. I have encountered people who straight up stole other artists' work and posted it, claiming they made it, in order to get fake internet points. I used to be a moderator on a site that had very strict rules about art theft - used to issue bans for it at least once a week. I can totally believe there are people on that site now using AI images in order to avoid detection.