Stylization of entire photo with generative fill

When the year generative fill was offered, many content creators offered methods of creating painting and other artistic effects either through quick masking and filling or creating an alpha channel and filling. But in more recent versions this feature doesn’t work for me. I tried generative fill directly, but got very weak effects.

Does this feature still work? If so, how? I don’t care for the look of neural filters and found the AI approach more interesting than the legacy artistic filters. 

Thanks