The GFS fantasy system is still there. As was discussed, it's the result of erroneous clown map generation which, for whatever reason, seems to plague vendor interpretations most frequently with the GFS (so yes, it ain't going to snow nearly as much as it is saying and never was, but it's still modeled as it was before for the most part). Here, I made a tool in Excel last night that allows you to input a few characteristics of a very simplified weather system in order to generate a QPF "map" along a geographic line. In this case, we put (in the yellow) a front moving at 50 kph with a width of 250km. The rate of precip. under the front is 0.05 in/hr. We then sample at the rate of one frame every 6 hours.
As you can see from the total QPF output graph, there are regions along our line where the sampled total QPF drops to zero. A tiger stripe (or anti-stripe) is forming every 300km (or every 6 hours) as a result. This is happening because we are under-sampling. For total QPF, the vendor products usually manage to not do this, but because there is such a large error in assigning precip type to QPF, the tiger striping artifact is showing up for reasons very similar to my model's.
I am going to add temperature to my model in order to more accurately produce the tiger stripe gradient artifact, but am too lazy right now.