See my reply to them:
I removed my comment because I believe you, and it's definitely plausible you're just paying homage in a realistic way - there's a bit characters that look very similar in pose/design to the characters in the screenshots here, and your style is clearly very inspired by that genre of 80s-90s horror manga (which is fine) but the similarity seemed more. I did find your illustration website though and I believe what you're saying - they're meant to be simplistic designs because the characters are mostly ordinary people (+ monsters) and to make it easy to ensure continuity across pages, and in this case it's likely just coincidence & you being strongly inspired by that style of manga art, apologies.
I do have examples, but they're from print comics that I have (since as I said, it's bit characters I'm thinking of and I didn't have success quickly googling for those specific comparisons). But I'm not going to post them because the artist responded and I believe them, it's just that Ito (and this style of horror manga in general) has been copied frequently and these seemed more similar than most. In this case I think it's just coincidence + clear inspiration/homage having read their comment and looking at their portfolio, so my apologies.