That's not really uncanny valley... so much as plainly amateur work.
I think its much more likely the greater volume of criticism is due to the fact that as OP gets closer to a known aesthetic, the precision of the criticisms can grow because it becomes more obvious what the goal is, and how its been missed.
Whereas a totally unstyled HTML page can't really be criticized usefully, because there is no real goal presented, and so nothing to really contrast against. At best you can say "fix everything".
Do you not see how their current page takes design cues from professional pages?