I don't think taste appears from nowhere. Part of it is built slowly, from looking at thousands of images, comparing one campaign to another, seeing what feels strong in a magazine but weak on a website, and noticing what looks impressive for one second but disappears from memory just as quickly.
Years of working with images change the way you see. You start recognizing patterns: the kind of polish that makes everything look expensive but not specific, the kind of skin that looks clean but no longer feels alive, the kind of color that feels fashionable now but may age very quickly, the kind of image that looks technically correct but does not hold attention.
This is why visual memory matters. It gives you something to compare with, not in order to copy, but to understand where an image belongs. Is it too close to everything else? Does it still have its own mood? Does the retouching support the direction, or does it make the image safer than it needs to be?
For me, taste is not only personal preference. It is also memory. Memory of images that stayed, images that disappeared from attention, decisions that made a photograph stronger, and decisions that made it cleaner but less interesting.
The more images you see, the harder it becomes to confuse polish with direction.