[Tuna-Fish]

> Who or what civilization managed to propagate this style so far beyond the reaches of what history taught us?

... European colonists, mostly. Star forts are what they built to protect themselves from the locals, who typically outnumbered them by some absurd margin. Because of this, you can find them wherever colonization was happening.

The Central Asian forts you linked are mostly part of the Siberian Line, a line of forts the Russians built where the northern forest turned to the southern steppe mostly in the early 18th century to protect their southern border from Kazakh raids, and to extend their influence eastwards. The land around them always looked like that as they were built on the periphery of the more fertile areas, to protect them. The forts themselves are so eroded mostly because they were not really built to last in the first place. As they were in the middle of nowhere, with no cheap transport available, they were built with what was locally available, which was often just packed earth with maybe a brick wall to keep the outer walls in shape.