It's always game journos who push for this shit, but it doesn't help when indie devs succumb to it as well and start parading around like they own the place before their first game is even out. Remember how Cassette Beasts was talking about how it was "Pokemon but more mature" for its entire pre-release period? Or how Yooka-Laylee was wholly marketed around the fact that "it's Banjo-Kazooie, but better!"?
The sentiment's been around for so long that even regular people do this shit now too, either in places as public as Steam reviews or in those as private as regular conversations on the topic.
It's gone from "[Doom, WoW, Pokemon, etc]-clones/-likes" to "[Doom, WoW, Pokemon, etc], but [insert adjective, typically "(more) mature" or "better"]" in like 5 or 10 years, and I can't imagine why.
My only theories circle back to the entire stagnant culture we're living in, where everything that exists must either be directly tied to a long-running corporate IP or compared to one for it to do anything whatsoever in terms of longevity, where even originality derived from such IPs is demonized for not being those IPs directly, but 1) that's melodramatic and a little off-topic 2) -like or -clone are arguably just as derogatory and harmful for marketing as "blank but better" if not moreso and 3) I'm not sure the people who spout this shit have enough braincells in them to realize what they're doing in the first place and just need a quick comparison to "sell" people on it.