i'd say these days paleo art is more "okay so we know what related animals look like, and we know what animals in the same general niche look like, so let's use those to fill in the blanks from the skeleton and make something that looks like you could find it in the wild"

honestly i feel like many people are quite a bit too generous towards people of the past, people just really liked to write fanfiction with fossils as the base for a lot of the history of paleontology.. Basically like what jurassic park did but they passed it of as enlightened science, conveniently forgetting to tell people that they just went ahead and moved a bone found near the legs up to the nose..
Certainly there was genuine attempts to recreate dinosaurs, but good lord a lot of it is just obviously biased, lord forbid dinosaurs not be portrayed as sluggish obsolete monsters!