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?
The Wirecutter, owned by NYT, along with the print edition of Popular Mechanics before them, only show reviews for a very limited subset of products. I'm sure there's many more examples, but this only hides their bias to the credulous.
Consumer Reports seems to review a much larger sample size of products, but they focus on cars, appliances, and other big purchases IIRC. And it costs money, but I have the login info from a boomer relative that pays for it.
Honestly, even though r#ddit has a big problem with astroturfing, if a comment thread is popular enough it usually gives good insight into whether something is worth buying or not. Don't get me started on how entire subr*ddits like buyitforlife have become co-opted, though.