I’m of two minds on this class of messages.
Barring specific cases where I have external knowledge that someone definitely doesn’t live up to their affirmative messaging in person; I have no reason to doubt the sincerity or positive intentions of people making these sorts of statements; so in that sense I have no reason to dismiss them as non-genuine; but I can’t shake the conclusion that, necessarily, statements of this sort are ultimately about the speaker rather than the audience.
In absence of any sort of evaluation of me, calling me beautiful can only be some combination of a belief that everyone is beautiful in at least some regard(and so a specific person must be beautiful) or a belief that humanity in general is beatiful and so individual instances of it must be; or potentially that ‘beautiful’ is a sufficiently mutable concept to embrace all people.
These needn’t be insincere beliefs; but even in full sincerity they are fundamentally abstract ones that apply to the speaker’s relationship with humanity generally or beauty as a concept. This isn’t to say that holding such nice ideas in that area is cliche, insincere, or otherwise bad(I have no reason to think so); just that such ideas are general; and cannot be specific to an individual about which the speaker has no specific information.
It’s only if there’s some space for individual judgement/assessment that the statement actually has a chance to be specific to the recipient rather than ultimately a reflection of the speaker’s general stance. This doesn’t mean that the assessment must be comparative; someone who assesses everyone they encounter as beautiful in some respect is still making assessments about them, rather than an abstract humanity, they don’t need an ‘unlike those ugly people’ clause to the assessment for that.
I think it’s the same class of distinction that has periodically come up (with a bit more theological charge) in discussions I’ve had with people who emphasize the all loving or all forgiving nature of a deity. I realize that, doctrinally, the demand that I be loved and/or forgiven on my merits isn’t going to fly(salvation by faith rather than works, postlapsarian concupiscence, etc.); but it’s still the case that when something will love or forgive anyone and anything that makes it deeply impersonal and abstract: it’s a pure expression of their nature in which your invovlement is purely contingent and incidental, it could be literally anyone else; and even if it weren’t anyone at all that property of their nature would presumably still apply.
