I want to push back on this idea. Back in the heyday of JohnK's blog, "CalArts style" referred to a kind of post-Disney/Don Bluth character design language that typified theatrical animation in the 90s. If you look at the late 90s/early 2000s wave of films, things like Titan A.E., The Iron Giant (which was better than most), Atlantis: The Lost Empire, etc -- a lot of them have a Milt Kahl knockoff look because that's what was the gold standard at CalArts at the time. JohnK's complaint was that young animators were aping superficial Disney-isms and making derivative crap instead of creating original design systems.
Fast forward 20 years, and what people mean when they say "CalArts style" is completely different. They're talking about the geometric, flat graphical character designs of things like Gumball, Steven Universe, Clarence, and Gravity Falls (i.e., the "bean mouth" era). This is all TV animation (theatrical 2D animation is deader than disco), and it's partly driven by the mechanics of modern digital animation production. It's also same-y and safe, but for different reasons.
Fast forward 20 years, and what people mean when they say "CalArts style" is completely different. They're talking about the geometric, flat graphical character designs of things like Gumball, Steven Universe, Clarence, and Gravity Falls (i.e., the "bean mouth" era). This is all TV animation (theatrical 2D animation is deader than disco), and it's partly driven by the mechanics of modern digital animation production. It's also same-y and safe, but for different reasons.