I think they were not saying that everyone has to record their conversations as a matter of course, but that no one making these allegations has any hard proof. They even mentioned that in many of these stories, Yelp is calling them multiple times - it would be nice if next time this happens to someone in a 1-party consent state, they would record the second call from Yelp.

In my experience, almost all stories get bigger in the retelling, especially when you have a grievance, having some hard proof at least helps to give you a baseline assessment of how much of an exaggeration the claims are.