Somewhere right now some human artist is being tasked with drawing illustrations of pelicans riding bicycles to be used as training data at a big AI lab.

The quality of the Gemini pelican was such a step change in one iteration, while the other benchmarks remained quite flat, that I think you are right. Although whether they targeted Pelicans in particular or just svg, I can't say.

Every modern image-generation model can generate a pelican on a bicycle trivially. The point of the test is to generate SVG text that represents an image, which is more complicated.

Yes, there are ways to convert raster images to SVG for use in training data but it's not a good use of anyone's time.