The main SAO gang actually kept their avatars' looks because of plot-convenience, kinda like how Kirito's avatar 'glitched' and he recovered his SAO stats at the beginning of Fairy Dance, because ALO's system was essentially a direct copy of SAO's, the guys who took over after Sugou was arrested decided to offer any SAO Survivor the possibility of keeping their SAO characters' data in ALO by converting their old accounts, which is why everyone but Shino and Suguha look the same (Also, is style-convenience: Even Sinon and Leafa actually have the EXACT same face as their IRL counterparts, this is easier to see with Sinon but a lot of people actually don't see it with Leafa, but if you put their faces side by side she and Suguha have the exact same one, is just that her hairstyle and eye color have such radical changes they're much harder to compare, but this is ultimately just an artist-convenience, canonically Sinon and Leafa, in-universe, have completely different faces to their IRL selves, funnily enough. Hilariously, is only in the spin-off from another author, SAO Alternative GGO, that we actually get to see how VR Avatars are really supposed to look by looking nothing at all like their IRL selves, because that's a main thematic of that spin-off XD).
But yeah, the thing is that, convenience of art in Canon SAO aside, this got handwaved mainly because of ALO...realistically Kirito and Asuna here in "FOG" (Even Liz and Klein really), that has nothing to do with SAO, and that didn't get a convenient account-conversion-thingie like in Canon, should also look nothing at all like their IRL-selves, especially because most VR games post-SAO didn't really have 'character customization', but mostly randomized the avatar's looks created when you made a new account. So Inoda should actually NOT really look like his IRL-self (And hilariously, if you compare them side by side, Fujino actually DID make VR Inoda slightly less ugly than IRL Inoda, lmao), and even if he did he should have immediately just erased the character and created a new account because of how 'useless' his skill was before he met KiriSuna and got to level up. The only reason none of this happened is because of plot-convenience, there is no real reason why Inoda didn't "reroll" his character until he got some muscled NTR chad rather than his loser fatso self