Actually, OE variants are made for whatever the OE wants, if the tire maker is willing to do so. They might be optimized for RR (fleet fuel economy). They might be optimized for low noise, cornering grip, or wet braking for government testing, customer first impressions, or consumer reports style testing...and wear faster because of this.
Back in the day of the MXV4, my father was part of a team that was tweaking OE fitment tires for Honda. Several iterations. Change tooling tooling at the factory, make 100 tires, test, rinse, repeat. Late nights adjusting tooling and then getting it onto the production line. Turns out Honda was trying to eliminate a very specific in-cab resonance. Michelin's design engineer put a brick on the passenger floorboard and made the resonance go away. At that point it was easier to change the tires than to change the body stampings.
Also, some of the tires sold as "CrossClimate" in the US are US designed, US produced. Some fitments are a different tread, different construction, made in Europe. It's not uncommon for Michelin to have many tires called and marketed under the same names. As we speak my tire shop is discarding some c-metric Agilis CCs made in France and installing Agilis CCs made in Poland (Michelin moved the tooling) which are very different than the lt-metric Agilis CCs made in typical US sizes.
In the end, directional tread is a gimmick, but how a tread pattern looks sells tires apparently. It looks cool, but we went through it with the GY aquatread years ago. Then there was the Michelin hydroedge. Then it went away for awhile. Now it's come back. It's not really better or worse but different.
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