Definitely nothing new, that’s been going on since before I got into 3d printing like 7 years ago.
There was a point where having a good first layer was actually critical to having good print bed adhesion and successful prints. 99% of problems were solved by re leveling the bed and/or cleaning it.
Now, with abl and fancy tools like lidar and better bed surfaces, it’s not nearly as essentially to get a perfect first layer, but it’s still a sign of a well calibrated printer.
I dare say it’s one of those things that’s just hung around because as waves of new users join the community (especially around times like Xmas when a lot of new people join), they start researching stuff and see older users posting about their first layer and think of it as some kind of rite of passage, so they post theirs… And then the next group come in and see it, wash rinse repeat…
Yes and no… You just don’t hear about the Chinese ones as much but there’s some that are up there with openai and Google, and there’s a very real concern that Trump’s policies will allow/encourage the global adoption of Chinese ai like Alibaba and Tencent’s ones. There was a whole report recently about the potential effect a popular Chinese ai would have due to it being able to manipulate facts and history, and people just not questioning it