I once did a remix competition. Not to win, just to have fun playing with samples and the discipline of having a time limit. I knew going in that what I was going to do had 0 chance of getting anywhere near the top.

The winning three entries were judged by the website, the artist, and 3 executives from the record label. And the winning 3 entries were all exactly the same.

They were all the same style of EDM (bear in mind, this was a poppy guitar song being remixed, so there was no particular driving factor towards that direction), they had similar bass lines & synth parts - both in terms of the riffs themselves and in terms of the sounds used. They all sped up and pitched up the vocal and chopped it in a very similar way. And they all had the exact same structure. You could literally play all three simultaneously (after timestretching by a couple of BPM to make them the same tempo) and the intro would be the same number of bars, the beat would come in at the same time, the vocals would come in at the same time, the dropdown would come in at the same time, the build-up would come in at the same time and lasted the same number of bars, they had the same bar of silence after the build-up, and then the drop did very similar things with the bass and all three went into half-time simultaneously.

There were hundreds of entries, and really what you had to do was make something that sounded like everything else. It was depressing, honestly.