I really don't understand how you guys can tell pixar/disney/illumination/dreamworks animations apart. It's all cartoons cg.
"Cartoon CG" is a broad brush to apply to anything. There's a lot of similar techniques employed but both movies like Into the Spider-Verse and Despicable Me fall into the distinction of cartoon CG, and they look nothing alike.
Lots of Dreamworks' stock-and-trade in CG was in pushing fidelity in the more immediately obvious areas. They've got a whole lot of movies about furry animals compared to Pixar (fur = more detail), which are often juxtaposed with things like realistic looking humans or character features (compare A Bug's Life to Antz, basically). Shrek more or less incorporated all of the aforementioned stuff to great success which made that a sort of rote low-brow formula among a lot of their mainstream productions for a while, including lots of gag animations, pop culture references and characters who can usually be caught doing the infamous "one furrowed eyebrow, one raised eyebrow" smirk either in promo material or multiple times during the movies. Generally they go for an "edgy" vibe in a kid-friendly kind of way. Pixar by comparison regularly goes for more simple designs that animate in more bouncy and expressive capacity while very much owning their all-ages appeal, though it's clear to any seasoned eye that they regularly pioneered new tech and attention-to-detail in far more subtle areas, making the movies feel grounded despite their look. They weren't afraid of making their designs animate in a more contemplative way. Wall-E is still one of the best looking CG movies ever made, and the Finding Nemo movies might have very cartoon-like main characters but the background detail of the movies remains stunning.
Obviously neither studios are boxed in by those common assumptions and neither are indicative of the individual quality of their output (movies like Kung Fu Panda and How To Train Your Dragon are at least just as good as Pixar's "high tier" movies on any average day imo). Some movies of theirs feel like they could've come more from the other company, and vice versa. Nonetheless, whenever people like to compare the "vibe" of both companies, their oeuvre does paint a significantly different picture.
