If your product is strong enough that people can link colors, shapes and typography directly to your brand, I think you need a pat on the back! For the rest of us, it’s good practice to be careful with established cannon when dealing with potential ambiguities. It’s known that certain color schemes respond to certain conventions, so as long as your brand doesn’t go against them you can use whichever color you want and still be able to communicate your message. The products you mention don’t go against any particular convention, so they can establish their brands within those color schemes.
You’re right, good catch! The reason is we don’t consider Unsplash to be a conventional stock photo repo, since the style and quality of photography digresses so much from the usual stock photo sites. We probably should have pointed out what we meant by stock photo- the article is targetting sites such as Shutterstock, iStock, Dreamstime, and the like. We love Unsplash, it has a very personal twist on similar subjects, making the photos available there that much more relatable and honest.
Hi! I’m Vicky from the Codelitt team and author of the blog post, thanks for your question! Consistency is a very important factor when trying to communicate your brand values and setting a clear message for your product, and color schemes shouldn’t be treated differently. Brands have core color palettes that help communicate and keeping those consistent throughout platforms will only strengthen the relationship between the user and the product. However, keeping everything in the UI the same is a bit tricky: there are limitations to how much desktop and mobile platforms should share in terms of UI, as each of them have a set of rules individual to them. While working within those rules, you should try to keep as many constants as you can. For example, if you’ve decided to make any major CTA red with a white font, you should keep that constant for every platform you develop. Consistency in such elements will help ease of use when your users jump from one platform to the next (think of picking up where you left off when switching from desktop to your phone). Menus and navigability, on the other hand, might differ from one platform to the next.
"Now, would anyone advocate for the opposite of consistency, convention, minimizing user work or being fast/giving feedback?"
Of course not, but nobody said anything about intentionally deciding against good UI principles. You might be surprised how often these things are simply overlooked.