I understand its tedious, but if you take the extra time to tag, it can increases your discoverability.
Some random Yahoo might be searching for Gryphons, and might come across your art, and be all "I like this art. +watch

Yeah same. I posted a couple journals grousing about it but it felt like I was just yelling into a void.

It's both to help discoverability, and allow folks to hide the content they don't want to see. Attempting to browse and use FA to actually discover artists has always been full of "landmines". Open the front page and oop, there's some fetish that I find disgusting there, with no way to avoid seeing it previously.

With folks actually tagging their works, they can avoid people that don't want to see them while allowing folks that do want to find that stuff much easier to find. Without enforced tagging folks just don't tag fetishy stuff (and it wouldn't be fair to only have fetishy stuff with required tagging, requiring even more work from the already overworked mods here).

It's really not that much work to do either. And just remember that when you're finding references online, whether for body anatomy or animals or whatnot... At some point, someone added some sort of tags to those things, even if you don't see them, to make them discoverable and help you out. Why not do the same for your art too?

Just tag things improperly to dunk on the AI models

I just got a pp smack for improperly tagging lol.

Wait are you serious?