It can be "playful" once or twice, especially if the text is playing with how nonsensical the metaphor is. By the twentieth time something is as tired as a willow tree on a Tuesday in May, as persnickety as an ant with a fever, or as rambunctious as a horny lobster, it's just nonsensical bad writing.

Metaphors are generally used to transfer the qualia of one experience into another. When the referent has no qualia, that is, you've never in your life experienced "river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree", it's a failure of a metaphor. You can quibble about how special this or that metaphor is, which I've already given an example of with the "playing with how nonsensical the metaphor is", but when all the metaphors are broken that way, all the time, the writer is not "breaking the rules because they've transcended them" or anything like that, the writer is breaking them in the bad way that the rules were put there to stop and the writer should consider taking a Writing 101 course.

Though anyone taking a Writing 101 course should be aware that as near as I can tell, completing such a course is prima facie proof that they are overqualified for the vast majority of modern writing jobs.

And as much as there are still people on HN who insist that AI text can't be detected algorithmically, it's worth noting that the original story is marked 100% AI by Pangram. So it's not just this person seeing things.

I actually really don't like the the "slip away from meaning phrase" at all. I do like "echo chasing itself off a cliff" though.

Saying "Metaphors..., slip away from meaning" instead of "Metaphors..., from which meaning slips away"

I dunno, it jumped out at me immediately.