Certainly golf course features have been copied from existing courses. I doubt many have a problem with that.
The problem occurs when a job is bid with preliminary design features asked for in the bid. Then a losing architect's feature or features end up in the winning architects work.
For a similar example, Tom Doak has stated he refused to provide a routing plan to bid on doing Hunter Ranch in Paso Robles. He says he didn't trust the client. After the bidding was done, the owner went ahead and did the course himself. Tom figures that since the owner had already gone through the golf course building process with an architect at his La Purisma property, the owner thought he could do it himself.