I don't think it's unrelated at all. I saw the same picture and just closed the tab right away. Why should I read this article, the whole thing might be written by an LLM.
Your comment reminds me of people complaining about how using emoji in communications/text has become normalized. Generating images with AI is pretty fun and seems like an appropriate thing to do for a personal blog. As in, this is the exact sort of place where it's most appropriate.
It's not like this person was ever going to pay someone to make a cartoon drawing so nobody lost their livelihood over it. Seems like a harmless visual identifier (that helps you remember if you read the article if you stumble across it again later).
Is it really such a bad thing when people use generative AI for fun or for their hobbies? This isn't the New York Times.
This happened to me too (almost subconsciously I might add). I'm actually not anti-AI at all, maybe a bit uninterested in AI-made art, since I don't fully see much use for it except for generating fun pictures of Golden Retriever dogs in silly situations, but this imitation-Ghibli art style is probably one of the least pleasing things to my eye that people love making. It's so round and without edge, it's colors are washed out in a very non-offensive way, and also it does not even look like the source material.
I wouldn't be so aggrieved by it, I think, if there wasn't that wave where everyone and their dog was making pictures in that style. Sorry, just a small rant tangentially related to the article, which is fine. :)