It’s not just the US even. It’s been a trend for many years already, both aimed at gymbros with gymbro nutritional science (“more protein is betterer”) and also selling that idea on to the general public because of the gymbro association.

I think the dumbest fucking thing I saw was a bar of chocolate I bought that proudly advertised that it had “high protein crisps” in it, and it was like 2% in a slab of milk chocolate.

Can’t explain that

I think that’s probably it, or pure cargo cult because “we’ve always had signatures so something’s got to go in that slot”. The whole idea of random scrawls for “authentication” has been weird all along. As if everyone walked around knowing what everyone’s signatures should look like. And if you do know, you can just… write it that way.

(Plenty of countries just have digital “signing” that’s a bit more like something sane, a central authentication thing based on your ID number and 2FA.)