Back then during Athlon XP/64 days, AMD coolers were crappy looking. Even the AMD sticker on the fan is always not in the center....
I wouldn't say they were great looking, but they didn't exactly look bad either. They were pretty much just a small case fan with a rectangular heat sink underneath, which was par for the course at the time. And when the system was running, the sticker would be a blur anyway, so positioning didn't actually matter much. Plus, windowed cases were not quite as common then, and those that were in use generally had relatively small acrylic windows, rather than the full tempered glass side panels popular now, so the internals of a PC typically weren't as visible.
And of course, the Athlon 64s were somewhat more efficient than the Pentium 4s, so they didn't need their coolers to be quite as large. Of course, that changed as Intel made a comeback with their Core-series, while AMD got stuck on the underwhelming Bulldozer architecture for much too long. Perhaps that's why they felt the need to reinvent their coolers for Ryzen though, since their bulldozer-era processors got a reputation for running hot and loud.