It is sad that this is what journalism has come to. It is even sadder that it works.
It feels like the human version of AI hallucination: saying what they think is convincing without regard for if it's sincere. And because it mimics trusted speech, it can slip right by your defense mechanisms.
Unfortunately, every review site uses affiliate links. Even organizations with very high ethical standards like Consumer Reports use them now. At least CR still gets most of its income from subscriptions and memberships. I guess that's something.
This is the real reason I don't trust sources that make money off affiliate links. The incentive is to recommend the more expensive items due to % kickback.
I haven't always agreed with them and sometimes the articles are clearly wrong because they're several years old, but they're usually good.
(I think I last seriously disagreed with them about a waffle maker.)
They are just lazy / understaffed. It's hard to make $ in journalism. A longstanding and popular way to cut corners is to let the industry you cover do most of the work for you. You just re-package press releases. You have plausible content for a fraction of the effort / cost.
Most bill in the US Congress are not actually meant to pass, they are just (often poorly written) PR stunts.
AFAIK the only real exception is Consumer Reports.
There was one “journalist” for the New York Times that reviewed cars, and he could never say anything positive about EVs - even to the point of warming consumers of the gloom that is EV. But after digging into his history, it was found he also published a lot of positive fluff pieces for the oil industry lol!