There's some discussion of "vanilla fantasy" and "generic fantasy" over at The Manse and ENWorld. On this blog I have the rather derogatory tag "extruded fantasy product,"but that's unfair. "Vanilla" is a kind metaphor; sometimes it's used in a derogatory way, but only out of snobbishness: the reference is to the fact that vanilla is common, but vanilla is common because people like it. "Generic" is a bit more ambiguous; "generic" things may be boring and cookie-cutter, but "generic" might also refer to "genre."
Provisional definition: generic dungeon fantasy is something where you can take almost any adventure or random table from a blog and throw it in there, and it can handle it.
I think this makes clearer what generic dungeon fantasy does and does not include - if, admittedly, it also makes it clearer that it is defined by family resemblance rather than a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. I also think it makes clearer why generic dungeon fantasy exists in the first place: network externalities. The "generic" here is as in "genre," and what it does is allow you to make things that make sense in small chunks, rather than one huge gestalt. You can do engineering rather than mere hacking. Right now I'm piggybacking on this coordination by writing in English anstatau usande Esperanton au fjkdsancslareoewa fkdmds f afsda lkk
It's worth noting what generic dungeon fantasy isn't. GDF doesn't need to be boring, unoriginal, or low conceptual density. Dungeon Master's Guild cruft (or Big Publisher Cruft) is mostly GDF,, but so is this and this and this.
Conformity to ISO standards fantasy is a clear design goal of many products, and such products offer the clearest tests of the boundaries of the genre itself. Both Freeport and various Raging Swan products will make references to, e.g., "a temple of the War God," which is both meant to make the product highly cross-compatible and makes explicit assumptions about what sort of campaign setting you have that it's cross-compatible with.
Most of what I make here is generic dungeon fantasy. Tlön isn't (note to self: need to get back to Tlön) but then Tlön is its own project. Deviations from the standards must be done individually and serially whereas conformity to the standards can be done collectively, in parallel, and in small chunks.
A network externalities lens is also, in some sense, less kind than the original metaphor expressed by vanilla. People don't eat vanilla because of cross-compatibility with other vanilla ice cream, but because they directly prefer it. But when cross-compatibility is an issue, we can get stuck with an inferior product because of coordination failures. Do we all like elves and clerics and taverns that much? Well, maybe!
That being said, having something that plays this role is nice. Having culture that no one owns (and not even WotC owns generic dungeon fantasy, even if it exercises an outside influence on it) and everyone contributes to a bit is good, and feels good to be a part of. Three cheers for the generic!
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