Review policies and processing times have been inconsistent last years on Shutterstock. We've gone through periods of stupid "focus" rejections before, periods of where reviews were rather fair and rejections were justified, and now they indeed seem to accepting nearly everything. Same for Adobe now, with rejections due to similarity which don't make sense and some lower quality stuff gets accepted. I guess this is how it goes, and I don't know what their strategy, if they have any, is. And I also don't really care for things I can't change.

Now for the record, I got a rejection earlier this week because they flagged my image as A.I. while it isn't. I didn't even use noise reduction or spot removal, but yeah, I did use focus stacking. As I did before without rejections. Every other agency accepted the image, Shutterstock didn't. So while they seem to be very flexible and seem to accept just anything, there are still weird rejections that don't make sense, as there have always been and probably always will be.