Yes, people completely misunderstand what the golden rectangle is about and why it's important. Its importance lies in the fact that it's canonical, a rectangle motivated intrinsically, independent of anyone's preferences (conscious or unconscious) or any experiment: the same golden rectangle would naturally be discovered by aliens on the other side of the universe, or even in alternate universes with totally different laws of physics. People looking for golden ratios in seashells and things like that haven't just missed the point, they've missed it by 180°, fired their arrows away from the target.

(Of course, there's an even simpler canonical rectangle: the square. But that one's too trivial to be interesting.)