Why would the client think something was wrong with the server? This smear/fudge would be no different than any other clock adjustment from the clients perspect

Why would the client think something was wrong with the server? This smear/fudge would be no different than any other clock adjustment from the clients perspective. All of the client machines would be querying Lower stratum servers that all agreed on the smear factor. The clients do not query public ntp servers, they only query internal google servers that all agree on the time smear/fudge.