Yes, pretty much. The game was making more and more awkward allusions to pop culture for the sake of it; now it's just straight up Pop Culture.

There are 2 Magic sets set on the Japan-inspired plane of Kamigawa. In the first set lore, the Kappa (turtle people) are extinct, as seen on Shell of the *Last* Kappa. In the 2nd more recent set, they're randomly back for one card so WotC can make a TMNT reference with the creature type.

Empire?

The problem with internet culture is that it's basically impossible islands to develop. The second anything even semi-original or interesting pops up, everyone is immediately on it. It immediately goes viral & spreads everywhere. There is no shelter, no hiding, no isolation.

It's genuinely fascinating to me that the WC team apparently anticipated no moral hazard to utilizing LLMs. It's like hiring a war criminal to do your paperwork and then being shocked people are angry.

IRL "Drake" as a word is synonymous with dragon, but I would hypothesize wizards uses it for its blue flying lizards as it has more of a "noble, enigmatic, evanescent" feel than "wyvern" which is associated with being more evil/bestial. Worth noting that Magic's five wyverns are all Creature -Drake.

You can blame medieval bestiaries and heraldry. By the late middle ages, dragons are generally defined as "four legs, two wings" and wyverns are two legs, two wings. It's a distinction that's pretty default in fantasy. (Game of Thrones actively a bit weird for four-limbed dragons.)

Seeing other human beings as Actually Human is always good though.