People are really into the color of the switches on their mechanical keyboard now, which is stupid, to me
The patent for the traditional Cherry-brand MX mechanical switch expired in 2014. Since then, it's been much easier to buy many different unique variants of the type of switch you can put in your mechanical keyboard. Any variation you can imagine has been sold - both designs that make sense, and designs that don't. It's really exploded within the last few years in particular.
This also means that Cherry had to start producing its own variants of the traditional switch, this time with a focus on "acoustics," which has become an incredibly important and fraught issue for some keyboard enthusiasts. So many of these new switches make claims about acoustics! I am a philistine who has never cared much about the sound my board makes - I have zero clicky boards, and I used to use o-rings on all my boards to dampen the sound for office environments anyway. So a lot of the variants have no appeal to me.
There are so many new switches out there making so many new claims that there are now people on reddit who focus entirely on reviewing switches or tracking information about them. (The poster in that link has an entire database website just about keyboard switches.) I also constantly see people arguing about how to describe the sound of a keyboard switch, since the terms people tend to use to describe the clicks - creamy, thocky, chocolatey, etc - have no real popular consensus re: sound. When I see people using these terms, I tend to assume that they are doing astroturf marketing for the switch itself, or are mimicking astroturf marketing language generated by the companies. "Creamy" is a real "wtf are you talking about" term for a clicking sound!
The funniest thing I have seen, though, is people being excited about the color of the switches. These are only visible on certain kinds of boards, and even then, they are only visible from certain angles and under certain conditions. Something half-visible or partially-visible is, however, always completely delicious to the true aesthetics fiend, both in keyboards and more traditional aesthetic fields like fashion. It's also pretty clear to me that the color of the switch might have a big impact on people specifically at the point of sale, since they make product photos a lot more interesting.
Unfortunately, they also affect backlighting. So if you salivate over a pomegranate-colored switch on a board with a lighting element, it will make that light more purple. Desired? Maybe. I don't know. It just adds another element to think about, I guess. And maybe that's all people want!
I cannot imagine that this will continue forever. There are so many switches and they are all so similar and the differences between them are only perceptible by true maniacs. But they also have the effect of creating an entire secondary ecosystem of youtubers who build and record the audio of keyboards with various switches and PCB mounting styles... and a "content creator" ecosystem like that sometimes tends to sustain a fad which would normally die in the nest.
I need to build one more keyboard... I have the parts at home and I'm waiting pretty much only on a PCB. This is gonna be my board for the office. I don't need it to do much except relieve hand stress and look good, to me, while I type. I just accept that I cannot see the switches, and cannot hear them like most people can, and cannot care about them the way that most people do. It's the final board. And I'm not trying very hard on it. :)