If you watch the youtube video[1] linked in the article you get a much better examples, that clearly look like AI slop. Tho I do understand that people's ability to discern AI slop varies wildly.
That's not what AI slop means. There's no GenAI.
I watched the video. It's literally just some mild sharpening in the side-by-side comparison.
It's not making the videos look fake, any more than your iPhone does. Most of what's shown in the example video, it might very well be phones applying the effect, not YouTube.
To you, that result looks like it was shot with a phone filter. To me it looks like it was generated with AI. Either way, it doesn't really matter. It's not what the creator intended. Many creators spend a lot of effort and money on high-end cameras, lenses, lighting, editing software, and grading systems to make their videos look a specific way. If they wanted their videos to look like whatever this is, they would have made it that way by choice.