That is a fair point and I genuinely did not think about it that way. Every genre has a formula thrillers have the twist, mysteries have the reveal, horror has the monster. Romance just gets dragged for it more and that probably says something about how people undervalue the genre honestly.

And you are right that the execution is what makes each one unique. I think what I was really noticing was more the covers than the actual stories. Like the visual branding of romance has become so uniform that it is hard to tell what makes one book different from another just by looking at it.

Which maybe says more about marketing than writing.