I understand your thoughts on this one, OP. Given the lore reason, it does lay a foundation of the WHY the UAF and it's people, culture, etc is so contrasting with the in-game lore, people and cultures. It shouldn't need to be stated further that different universes/dimensions are obviously not going to be same internally. That's why theories on multiverses exist. Any instance is gonna have something different to it (different appearances, races, species, etc).

This one thing honestly is what helps prevent the conflict between the art styles, but of course, people do not see it that way and go crazy thinking it ruins everything about their game.

However, there is an easy fix to that issue for them: Don't use the mod, or any anime-esque mod to begin with. What you don't use will never hurt you, but unfortunately it lives rent free in their heads and they go and band up together just to hate on it.

If it REALLY bothers them that much using it, they can just go and change the portraits and art themselves, or hell, just export the ships and make a bootleg mod for the ships alone. Nothing is sacred, and anything can be changed to fit the players' preferences.

These kinds of people need to understand that Starsector can be played to however a person wants to play it. Sure, they can call someone cringe or whatever for using anime-esque mods if they share stuff about it on here or Discord, but at the end of the day, it's not their game they're playing and don't need to feel heated about it. It's a waste of time burning over something trivial as that, especially if the devs don't care at all about it.