If I'm about to drop $3-6k on a laptop, I want to know beforehand that it's going to be a PITA connecting things to it.
The fact that lots of people think it's difficult, and that Apple responded to their problems, is also useful to see.
If people don't like USB-C, they're just going to rate everything Apple makes as a 1.0/5, which, as far as a normalization algorithm is concerned, is the same as rating everything a 5.0/5. It carries no signal and gets completely dropped from the algorithm.
What they have is a perfectly legitimate issue with not being able to use their existing peripherals with a supposedly top-of-the-line professional laptop/desktop with an unquestionably professional price.
Removing the reviews is PR sterilisation. It's appearance management. It's wilfully turning a deaf ear to any feedback that suggests the Emperor may not be fully clothed.
It has absolutely nothing to do with raising the SNR in the store.
Or, for a direct analogy: you can't have Hot or Not where it's just one dude. Is he hot? Is he not? Undefined.
Now, freeform text reviews: sure, they might hold some meaning, even in a single-seller marketplace. (For subtle behavioral-economic reasons, I would hypothesize that they probably don't, but let's pretend they do.) I would posit, though, that whatever's in those reviews is already the result of "PR sterilization." What you're seeing is what Apple wants you to see. It's their store.
Reviews only "work" (i.e. have guaranteed real signal, rather than "maybe real, maybe fake" signal) when incentives in a marketplace are aligned such that even the marketplace owner has no incentive to tamper with which reviews are or are not visible. That is not true here, and so the reviews are not, and never were, trustworthy. They were noise from the start.
More likely, they dislike it because it's inconvenient and difficult to use with their devices.
Hell, APPLES OWN DEVICES don't even support USB-C.
Now apple has wiped the laptop clean and introduced a port that they don't even support with their own product lines, despite it being the only port on a macbook pro for nearly 4 years.