I wonder if there's some weird accounting going on, or if this is real. It would mean around 24M images an hour and that's in the area of "more images than anyone will see". It means there's lots of wasted automated effort in this process somewhere, even if we assume some creators will request 8x variants of their ideas.
I don't use AI image generation anymore, but when I was fiddling with it I would generate dozens of images per idea, limited only by my patience. "The same thing but a little different" is the easiest feedback you can give anything.
Same, when I messed around with it to learn how the models worked I would generate batches of hundreds or thousands with slightly tweaked prompts and negative prompts to get a sense of how the inputs changed the outputs.