I've heard this as a reaction to the strategy before. "Now you're much more recognizable!" Well, yes and no. You're identifiable in the sense that you're unique among people in a crowd. But that equivocates between two different senses of identify. There's nothing actionable about looking at a person who looks different and saying "well they look different." That doesn't attach to any database or anything.
Meanwhile, positive facial identification attaches to all kinds of legal and intelligence infrastructure. Now, you can be charged with crimes, have a warrant executed against you, can be accused of supporting terrorists if you show up to a protest, etc.
I suppose I don't think the criticism is wrong, but it seems to presume that this is new information not previously understood rather than an intentional calculated risk.
Especially at the time it came out, surveillance footage was mainly going to be reviewed by mark I eyeballs, so the inability for computers to notice where a face was is going to be way outweighed by the person being sooo much more recognizable to a human.
If you don't think there is a disadvantage to looking different in a protest, think about the "qanon shaman" from 1/6 him looking different totally made him more of a target to being identified.
I'm struggling to understand how this is responsive. Unless those "mark 1 eyeballs" are a positive identification of a specific person, you're repeating my own observations back to me. You can conceivably be noticed in a crowd, but not positively identified.
I don't think "camouflage" fits any definition of what Qanon Shaman was wearing, either in a general sense or in the tactical sense we're talking about here.
so first off, if you are noticed in a crowd but not identified, that might single you out to be pulled from the crowd.
Also if you have a distinctive face paint then your image might be shared more, or just noticed more in the images that are shared to give more opportunities for people to recognize you or to remember your face to be recognized latter.
Also having a distinctive face would make it easier to track in different sets of footage especially when the technique was originally demoed in 2011.
I understand the mechanism you're tracing, but it feels like there's a category error here. Everything you're saying hinges on the circumstantiality of human reaction and interactions, which is extremely hard to model in a credible way and easy to become colored by subjective biases informed by things like TV and movies. Those channels of recognition and reporting that would lead to positive identification, are nebulous idiosyncratic and depend too much on speculation.
It's not to say it wouldn't ever happen, but there's an order of magnitude difference between that and guaranteed positive identification which is what informs the calculated risk.