I think I tend to trust outlets more if they don't pay so much attention into keeping up with the design style of the day.

Overfocus on this shallow surface quality has a correlation with a lack of underlying quality in the actual content. It's not that you can't have both or that I don't appreciate surface quality. But if something is ugly or simple or doesn't follow trends and has great content, it tends to remove a certain sort of person as consumer and perhaps lowers the temptation to cater to shallow desires because not many are around to get hooked.

That is, many things are better because certain parts of them are objectively worse and turn away certain people.