I think it's like millennial grey. Not only is it more expensive to add ornamentation, it also hurts resale and repurposing of buildings. Ideally you want mostly identical boxes where you could change the sign to make it a church, a McDonalds, a clothing store, etc every few years.

Or that seems like the goal of commercial builders now, right?

This is the crux. Houses used to be built to be lived in, so ornamentation added value. Now they are commodities to be traded and sold, and variation makes a portfolio harder to manage/less uniform.

I wish people would stop calling it millennial grey. It's Gen-X grey. Kim K and Kanye were the ones who built the logical conclusion in their contrast-less white casa; millennials are born maximalists who pair tech accoutrements with actual wood grain because their fondest memory is of being sat in front of a PS1 and a CRT housed in a stained oak cabinet in their childhood den, wires, manuals, remotes, and jewel cases hither and thither.

re commerical buildings today, absolutely. Most developments, especially retail ones have the goal of being wrapped up in a commerical real estate portfolio. That might be a REIT or held by a private investor. Their goal is to collect buildings with the widest marketability for retail. They are not generally curating locations with intent. Though some owners specialize in that in high density tourist or luxury retail spaces.

To be fair, this isn't entirely new. The American West was strewn with cheap wooden structures that all looked alike with big fake fonts with hand painted signs. Those mostly rotted so they're uncommon in our lexicon outside of movies.