To address the original poster's remarks, if we take "style" in the making of art as being distilled into making a set of choices up front, the same way every time, then we can see that style need not be an end to a journey.
If we make almost no choices up front, if the "style" is simply "I like small canvases" then the road is long before us, almost anything is possible. The style is probably not recognizable as such, though.
If we make too many choices up front, so that every picture tends to look like every other picture, the road is very short. There is no wiggle room, the journey may indeed be said to be over.
Suppose we strike a good balance: I like small canvases, I mix my colors thus and not thus, I tend to like botanical subjects. Then we have a perhaps recognizable style, we have limited ourselves to an extent, and made the job easier. There is still a lot of wiggle room, there are still vastly many pictures we can paint. The style becomes a framework in which we work, rather than a cage in which we are constrained.
I view it a bit like working in sonnet form, for example. There are infinitely many sonnets that can be written, on infinitely many themes, but the form remains. The form saves us a lot of work by defining how big the poem is, which in turn defines a bunch of stuff. We needn't worry about how long to make the lines or how the rhymes should work, this is all sorted out for us. The sonnet form conversely creates a lot of work, because now our idea must be made to fit the form. Similarly with art and style -- be it personal style, or Vermeer's style or Turner's or Weston's. It limits, it grounds, it provides a firm basis on which to proceed, and it creates problems we must solve, all at once.
By employing a poetic form, or an artistic style, we connect each piece we make with other pieces made perhaps by others, perhaps by ourselves. This has, one supposes, some sort of value.
All that said, yes, too restrictive a set of choices can spell the end of a journey, and all the results pretty much come out the same. That would certainly be an undesireable outcome. Except, perhaps, for commercial artists, eh?