All of the google results are articles that were obviously written by a machine and recommend the same ten most popular products. There are communities for every conceivable type of product on reddit, but they are all full of people saying things like "this $ 500 toaster is a pretty good starter, but you'll soon want to upgrade to this $ 1200 one, it has a much fuller set of features." I've had to resort to watching youtube videos, but even those are unreliable because they benefit from calling each product the best or worst ever.

I feel like it wasn't like this just five or ten years ago. Did things actually change, or am I just misremembering?