The things, there IS room for a fair bit of weirdness. If you look at major wars, things can get pretty gritty and odd in just a couple years. Bandits wearing crazy crap to look scary seems fine to me, people building crazy vehicles out of leftovers seems fine to me. But not EVERYONE ends up like that is the thing.
If the game can't decide if it's 7 Days After or Mad Max, that's fine, as long as the same applies to the players, by which I mean there should be some options for crazy and some options for normal. The outfits seem to match this philosophy somewhat, but as long there's still "regular" clothes in the game, then there absolutely will be a mix of looks on players (and hopefully NPCs - look at the traders, they're all wearing fairly "normal" clothes.), by the same token, one hopes there might be a few raider/ganger zombies mixed in with the ones we're used to. Some cringing civilians entirely in normal clothes would be a neat addition too, but I get that we won't see that anytime soon (hey TFP, rescue/escort missions, please?)
The same goes for the cars. It's not weird that there are crazy cobbled-together cars, it's bizarre that the wrecked ones all look normal and the running ones all look weird (or will after the update). But in this case I'm assuming only mods will solve this issue, where a player might want to drive around in a sweet regular car and not a monster truck or a toilet on wheels. The demand for this is self-evident, as vehicle mods have been one of the most popular mod types for years. More importantly, they already seems to follow the "mostly normal, but with some weird stuff" aesthetic. The same is true for weapon mods - what's popular among players is generally (but not exclusively) mods which add existing real-world guns. POIs tend to be normal locations, and not crazy castles or wasteland forts. The game doesn't exist in a dataless vacuum we just argue about theoretically; we can see what people create and download.
Oh and the "goofy" shop names like "The Booby Trap"? Okay first off TFP are just having some fun - I wouldn't read too much into that. And second, geez, if you think that's weird, you clearly have never driven through like, upstate PA, or rural TN, or any number other places IRL with small towns that seem to consist of a rest stop, porno store (even in the 2020's!) and billboard ads for private investigators. Small-town USA is flippin' STRANGE man - Florida man is in fact everywhere. Hell, I used to live down the street from pizza place called "Meatsauce Pizza - You'll love our meatsauce on your pizza!"
