> the main sources of information (i.e. industry magazines) were so absurdly pseudo-science.
This is true of almost any industry magazine that does reviews. It's all trash, gamed, manipulated, paid for.
The bike magazines are utter trash, with everyone mocking phrases like "horizontally compliant, vertically stiff" which used to be a given for carbon frame bike reviews, and keep shouting about efficiency in "power transfer." I wish I were joking when i say these idiots used to claim that the soles of your cycling shoes were not "transferring" power "efficiently." It's now easy to buy a bike that weighs less than the bikes run in the TdF (which has a minimum weight limit for safety/reliability.)
PC hardware, especially cooling stuff? Trash. Reviews will claim x degrees temperature reduction but not tell you the room temperature or humidity, or even noise level. Reviews are heavily, heavily 'paid for' in that companies just send hardware free to reviewers and if they don't say nice things, they stop getting hardware for free which kills them off pretty rapidly.
Photography magazines, same thing. They don't tell you that all their reviews are all based off gear provided to them that has been likely hand-assembled very carefully, and extensively tweaked and calibrated for the press circuit. The $500 lens you buy off the shelf a year later? Nowhere near the QA went into it than did the lens that was shipped to Photography Wank Magazine. Not a single photography magazine blind-purchases their gear retail. Not a single one looks at more than one sample.
Car reviews? It's all a focus on performance and looks, and nothing to little about repairability, reliability, depreciation. They wax poetic about all sorts of subjective bullshit about a brand or model. I'm a car guy. It's a bunch of steel and rubber and aluminum, made to a price for a particular market segment. Car manufactures have been caught specifically setting up cars for particular auto reviewers; most famously, Top Gear caught Ferrari specifically modifying their cars for Top Gear's test track and putting much stickier, expensive tires on. Ferrari responded by refusing to provide review cars to Top Gear, and when TG found private owners to loan them cars...prohibiting owners from allowing any Top Gear staff to use their car for a review. If you were found out, Ferrari would ban you from buying a Ferrari, or just not give you the normal priority for new models.
Tech companies are now getting caught cheapening their hardware right after reviews come out and early retail sales. Most commonly with SSDs; they make a really sweet SSD model with a great controller/DRAM/flash chips and then a month or two later quietly switch out the controller, use less/no DRAM, use lower grade flash, etc.
The bullshit generation has shifted to "creators" - people who make videos telling a 'story' about the 'experience' and kinda sorta reviewing the product, but they have little or no qualification to objectively review the item in question. So you have guys who are tech youtubers reviewing electric cars but they don't know shit about cars, tech reviewers reviewing bicycles and bicycle products they don't know shit about, etc. PR firms specifically seek out reviewers who aren't experts in a particular product category or industry because they don't know what to look for or how something compares to what else is on the market.
Not even stuff from supposedly reputable reviewers is trustworthy anymore. Wirecutter, now bought by the NY Times? Every time I've trusted their reviews, the product I ended up with turned out to have glaringly obvious flaws the somehow expert panel of reviewers didn't notice or mention. They're also in the habit of comparing very old products they've owned and used for ages against new stuff, and recommending buying the old product. For example: their vacuum cleaner review recommends a Miele vacuum they've had for years. If you read the Amazon reviews, you see plain as day comments talking about how the model is no longer made in country X but country Y to a much lower cost, and the new models are junk that fall apart/fail like crazy.
Another example: I bought a set of sheets recommended by Wirecutter. They were garbage, fell apart rapidly. Reading the comments later on the store website, I see drumroll please they clearly changed the sheets - people saying the manufacturer had clearly changed suppliers or something.
Another example: a set of bluetooth earbuds. The Wirecutter review neglected to mention that the proprietary charge connector adapter hadn't been available for over a year, which meant your $150 headphones were "totalled" by losing a $20 piece of plastic. It also neglected to mention that powering them up played a booming theme song, and any event triggered a voice actor shouting things like "HEADPHONES CONNECTED!" or "BATTERY LOW!" in your ears, genuinely startling if you're listening to some quiet meditative music. The volume of these effects did not match the set volume for the headset and if you looked in the forums - people had been BEGGING the company to do something about it for YEARS. Which they did not, despite bragging about how their smartphone app should be installed because it could do firmware updates.